Lola's Sight, Sleep Habits and Spit-Laden Teeth

I don't think Lola can really see much at all anymore. I've already discussed the phenomenon of her not wanting to keep her glasses on. Today she asked me what time it was.  There's a clock directly across from her chair on the mantle, so I asked her to put her glasses on and tell me what time it was. She couldn't see it.

There's also my digital alarm clock that I keep on the end table between her chair and the sofa I sleep on. I turned it around so she could see it. She couldn't see it. I picked it up and held it about a foot from her face. She still couldn't read the time.

It's hard for me to understand the need she has to keep flipping through magazines and her photographs if she really can't see anything. Lately, she's begun to pick magazines up and flip through them. She'll spend barely a second glancing at each page. Yet she wants to flip through them. She keeps looking through her photographs, but I'll bet she can barely see what she's looking at.

Her sleep habits have seriously changed during the last two weeks. What might have been an occasional desire to go to bed early seems to have solidified into a need for more sleep. Tonight, during the "what-time-is-it" incident, at 7:30 p.m., she thought it was time to go to bed. I encouraged her to follow her more routine habit and stay up a bit. Although I have changed her normal medicine time to 10:00 p.m. By 10:30 when I checked on her, she was asleep in her chair.

I roused her to go to bed. It generally takes about 10 minutes for her to get from her chair to the bathroom and then on to her bed. So I came back to my computer and this post. In about 10 minutes I heard her chair creak. By the time I got up and in there, she was flipping through a magazine. She'd forgotten she was on her way to bed. After asking if she hadn't been ready for bed, she decided she had been and got up on into her bedroom.

For the young, it's difficult to comprehend how agonizingly slow going it is for an extremely aged person to get to a room 15 feet away, take off a housecoat, pull the covers back on a bed and actually get into the bed. It's amazing that these few actions can take nearly 10 minutes. It's difficult for me, and I'm not especially young.

On the list of difficult things for me to cope with, let me firmly place handling spit-laden dentures every time the older person eats something. Add to that list kindly replying to the statement offered at every denture handling of, "You know the routine, don't you?"  It's sad when you find yourself not wanting to get up and feed your aged parent because you dread handling the spit-laden dentures, again, for the umpteenth time that same day.

P.S.  In the title I put teeth because lately my blog seems to be a magnet for people fixing pipes and teeth. Pity you have to talk in code on a personal blog. It's the California pipe fixers I'm really getting fed up with. Can't even call them by their professional name, or this post, too, will get spammed by some hot-shot Californian wanting to advertise their probably-shoddy company - on a little-read blog east of the Mississippi. Like that's a smart expenditure of advertising dollars.

Dentures and Mowing

On Sunday Lola went  to the bathroom at least twice an hour all day. I'm pushing her drinking, but she resists that. I'm keeping an eye on whether or not she might have an infection or if it's just the dropped bladder. Neither of us have ever been prone to urinary tract or bladder infections; I don't really think it's an infection. I don't recall ever having one, nor her having one.

On Monday I forgot to bring her a spoon for her breakfast cereal. After getting bushwhacked by Joe to start the mower and going into the basement to clean a shelf, I came back by Mom. She and her bowl of cereal were just sitting there. She doesn't have enough mind left to get up and get herself a spoon from the kitchen. At suppertime, I brought her meal and sat it on her tray. About 5 minutes later, I walked by and realized she hadn't started eating. I said, "Mother, eat your supper." She shook her head at herself, picked up her fork and started eating.

 Joe has been happily mowing the yard Monday and today. Monday morning, Uncle Charles came by and helped Dad bag up a bunch of grass clippings. Dad had raked and raked them (the results of letting the back go for so long) into little piles, then spent Sunday marrying the piles. Thank you Uncle Charles for all that you do.

At one time, Dad would have gotten his golf cart, attached his big wagon/little trailer to it and taken care of this in no time flat. Now I don't dare let him do things the easy way because I can't let him drive the cart. If I, myself, or Uncle Charles were to drive the cart, then I'd have to go round and round with Joe on a daily basis over the golf cart. Just saying the key is lost for so long has mostly ended that. Joe can't be allowed to run the golf cart anymore. His driving skill is so poor he was running into trees, buildings and porches, and I was scared he was going to tip over on some slope. At one point, he was driving it with one roof support broken and flapping around and was totally oblivious to it.

This morning I wanted to see if Mother would ask for a meal. Finally at 2:30, I couldn't stand it anymore and got her lunch. I wonder if she's not feeling hunger or what. I wonder how long she would have gone before either asking me for something or thinking of getting up and getting something.

I don't dare fix her dentures before I bring the meal, because she'll suck the glue out before I can bring the meal. Today, I brought the meal, got her bottom denture and fixed that. I went to the kitchen to get her a straw, and when I came back, she'd tugged the top denture out, so I had to take that to the bathroom and brush it. When I came back, she'd taken the bottom denture out and was wiping off all the fresh glue I'd just put on it. Oy, vey.

Actually, I wonder if something major has recently broken in her brain.