RouletteWeekend

Well, I’ve managed to work myself into illness. I’ve been so focused on getting everything back into this house and everything in its place that I’ve done what most caregivers tend to do and I forgot to look after myself. The scratch in the back of my throat has moved into my chest and turned into a full blown cough. I’m feeling much better now that I am upright.

The thing about looking after yourself when someone in the house has Alzheimer’s is that their brain doesn’t compute that you’re sick.

They still get up and start their day without you and, quite frankly, hearing mother in law shuffling around downstairs while I am laying comfy in bed upstairs is stressful.

People have said (including myself) that caring for someone with Alzheimer’s is like having a child, but I would argue that it’s much much different. Sure, you have to be the parent in some way, but when you are raising a child, you can say “don’t touch the stove,it’s hot” and even if they don’t listen to you and touch the stove, they will learn after that first time not to do it again and it will be stuck in their brain, stove equals pain. They can learn from their mistakes or they can learn from you.

Alzheimer’s seems like the great unlearning of everything one piece at a time.

I went to feed the dogs this morning and the food scoop was gone. This happens on a regular basis. I went into mother in laws bedroom to get it because usually it’s on her dresser, but not today. What was on her dresser was a handful of dog food, some cut up hot dogs that I use for giving the dogs their meds, the cat food container from the laundry room and assorted other items. In the bathroom on the floor was a doggie pee pad with a large circle of pee and another handful of dog food. She just doesn’t remember.

The dogs get fed multiple times a day. I’m trying to create a system with the whiteboard where we can check off if they’ve eaten or not because hers are both overweight. Mine get fed upstairs away from the other two. But a white board is only as good as the memory it takes to check it.

So today, I will send Will and his mom to the grocery store with a list that should take them about an hour to complete and I will go into her room and commence to undoing the mess and putting things back in order.

It’s a never ending cycle and much like when your child does something for the first time, you can’t get mad because they didn’t know any better. The second time, you get annoyed because you told them already. The third time and beyond, you might lose your shit. Alzheimer’s is different.

When you first get a diagnosis, you have such empathy and sympathy. The little mishaps or misplacings make you sad. Or at least that’s how it was for me. Then after the same thing happens again and again and again, you start to get mad. The anger is toward everything possible. Anger toward mother in law for getting the disease in the first place, anger toward the brother in law for taking advantage of her and leaving her destitute so she can’t afford help, anger toward Will because it’s his mom, anger toward the house because it’s so big and needs so much, anger toward myself because I love him too much to walk away and I know walking away is just me being selfish or maybe it’s just me being exhausted. And then I just got too exhausted to be angry. And then I landed here. Now when I see the wreckage that is mother in laws memory free bedroom and bathroom, I have to look at it more like a clinician. This is why it looks this way, what’s the easiest way to fix it? For me, it’s get her out of the house and when she comes home to a breathable clean space, she just thinks she left it that way when she went to the store.

That is my life now.

I’m still working through the resentments because I feel like we’ve been cleaning up someone else’s life since the day we walked through the door Christmas day last year, but there is some light at the end of the tunnel. We have no more storage units sending us bills. We are almost done with the downstairs. We will finish the upstairs hopefully in the next two weeks and by December, the presents won’t be the only thing tied neatly in a bow. And when we pack the Christmas things away at the end of the year, hopefully we can pack the stress of this last year away with it and finally get on with our new life.