Sunday, August 15, 2010

And so it is

So here we are.  Last night Mummy had her first episode of 'sundowning'. 

Things were going along as usual, when all of a sudden, she didn't know where she was or why.  We ran out of one of her medications and it's been more than two weeks (probably closer to three) since we last administered them.  [Many requests to the doctor later, I've had to switch back to the original gerontologist, though I'm not entirely confident about his skills, but that's a whole other story right there.]  Anyway, last night I administered the outstanding pill for the first time in some time.  Some time thereafter, Mummy's brain just switched off.  It was similar to a computer crashing and then coming back online having lost everything beyond some unknown moment in time.  I don't know that the two things are connected, but I'm just logging what happened at this point.   

Usually, if there's a hiccough with Mummy's mind, we can offer food and beverage and things come back online eventually. This was not one of those events.  This time, nothing helped.  She drank two or three 8 oz glasses of water, but nothing.  She eventually went upstairs to bed (led by her granddaughter because she suddenly didn't know the house) and came back down, once, twice, confused, turned around, lost.

This episode was much, much worse than we've ever seen from her before.  As bad as it was last night, it got worse this morning because on waking we found that she didn't know either of us.  She answered when spoken to, but when prodded to express her obvious confusion, she admitted that she didn't know where she was.  My sister's typical response to this is to ask a series of questions that begin with her name, where she is and who we are.  This morning, she didn't know the answers to most of the questions asked.

This is how it goes.  The result of all this psychological drama, is that it took some time to get her into the bath and dressed for church.  We got out the door, but were quite late for church as a consequence of this morning's run in with Big Al (zheimer).  She evenutally got her feet back under her and a couple of hours later, she had no recollection of the distressing events of the morning.  Blessed forgetfulness I guess.
 

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