Thursday, October 4, 2018

I can't beleve she ate the whole thing

Good lord...I'm getting dementia!  It wasn't until Ned mentioned it this morning that I realized I had not posted an entry yesterday!

It was on the whole for the most part, a quiet day yesterday.  Ned came over to install a new shade over the kitchen sink.  Silly to get so excited about it but it was a type of shade I had not seen before and, having lived with one that is very old and ripped for years, I was thrilled to have this new design brightening up the room.


Things went as every day, with Walt taking some time out to go to lunch with office buddies.  I don't even remember what I did, other than taking a nap.

But around 5:30 came a call from Atria.  My mother had gone into someone's room and "grabbed her" and since they have observed her behavior as "off" this week, they thought she might have a bladder infection.  I said I'd get her in to the doctor this morning, but they wanted her seen NOW.  Too late to get to the local Kaiser, so we drove her to the ER in Vacaville, where after extensive waiting, and lots of complaining, it was determined that there was no sign of infection.  I was pleased that the catheter insertion went well.  Last time she screamed so loud and kicked at the nurse and threatened her and I was just dreading it this time, but the nurse was great and it was over before my mother even knew it was happening.  And there is no sign of infection, which was good.

She was, of course, very unhappy to be out at the doctor's and complained a lot.  When we got into the car to go home, she said, very plaintively that all she wanted was for something nice to happen and that nothing nice ever happens to her.  She wants to go home, close her eyes, go to sleep and never wake up.  So I asked if she'd like to go out to dinner.  At first she said yes and then when I mentioned it again, she got that very submissive tone I hate and said "I'll do whatever you want." I just wanted to do something that might shake her out of her now-perpetual funk.

We went to Denny's and she was happy to be in some place new.  This was the placemat at our seats


My mother kept looking at it as if she knew she was supposed to eat the food, but couldn't figure out how.  She asked me which she should eat first and I told her we would order off the menu and then eat.

I ordered her a broiled chicken off the senior menu and hoped she could eat it all, since she seems to eat so little these days.  It came with soup, salad, bread and fruit and each thing came in a separate bowl.  She is easily overwhelmed, so when the soup came first and she started eating it (but didn't know what she was eating and wasn't sure she was eating it properly) and then two more plates arrived, I moved the soup out of the way and gave it to Walt because surely that would push her over the top and she couldn't eat it all.

Walt and I each had a cobb salad, which was huge


(shown with my mother's fruit bowl)

She started eating her salad and just kept putting one bite after the other in her mouth untilshe had finished everything, including dipping her bananas and grapes into the salad dressing and then eating the extra salad dressing with her spoon out of the bowl on the side, spreading it on her chicken and then picking up her chicken and eating it like a biscuit, etc.  


She started clearing away her place, including putting her napkin in what was left of her glass of water, then she lifted it out, spread it out, tore it into quarters and started eating it.  I told her it was a napkin.  "I KNOW it's a napkin," she said, continuing to put it into her mouth.  I took it away from her after she finished the first quarter.

Then she took her spoon and tried to eat the ice cream on the placemat.  I couldn't believe how much she had eaten already but asked her if she wanted ice cream and she said she did.  I ordered a sundae for the 3 of us to share and she ate most of that and then tried to eat the placemat ice cream again.  When I mentioned that she had already eaten ice cream and she said she didn't remember eating anything, but she would not object if someone gave her a bowl of ice cream.

I decided she didn't have an infection she was just starving!  Actually, I think she has lost the ability to feel hunger or to feel full.  Put it in front of her and she eats it.  No food in front of her and she doesn't feel hungry.  She obviously doesn't TASTE anything since she didn't know what she was eating with the soup and saw nothing odd about the taste of the napkin.

But I think it did perk up her spirits briefly to be in a restaurant and I told Walt we need to take her out every 3-4 weeks or so to a restaurant just to give her a change of scenery.  Preferably a place with linen napkins!!

As for my mother's attack on another "innmate," I don't know what to do.  I'm afraid she will be thrown out of Atria (as her own mother was thrown out of the rest home where she was living) for aggressive behavior...and if that happens I don't have a clue what to do or where to take her, given that we (she and I in the pre-dementia days) long ago realized that with Polly, the stairs, and the bathroom being upstairs this is not the ideal place for her to live, even if we created a bedroom out of the living room for her.

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