Day 6: Agitation

I woke up at 2:30 this morning, while Schmidt was helping Ma to the bathroom. After he wiped her up, I held her hands for a while and sent him back to bed. (Although she spends much of the day asleep, she needs someone with her before she can drift off comfortably.)

About 6:00 this morning she dumped her water all over herself, so it all had to be mopped up. Then I calmed her back to sleep, before going back to bed myself for another hour.

This afternoon she got very agitated. First she wanted to walk out onto the deck. I told her she couldn't, and she insisted I allow her. So as soon as she stood up she had to cling to me, and begged to go "back" to bed (which she had never really left). Once she was ensconced back in bed, she wanted to go out on the deck or walk around the house. I said we just tried that, and she couldn't.

Next she asked for Pa Schmidt. [You remember that he died back in 2008.] I said I didn't know where he was. 

She wanted Pa to drive her home. I said she was already home.

Well then, could I drive her home? I repeated that she was already home.

Could I at least call Schmidt? Maybe. Why? "Because I'm a nervous wreck!"

So I gave her an anti-anxiety pill. It didn't make much difference. We had more conversations like this one, and she started climbing out of bed. Why? To get away and walk to the neighbors. Why? Because I wouldn't allow her to leave!

I gave her a second pill.

About this time Schmidt came back. She asked him to stay because she didn't know me. He gave her a third pill. She was very suspicious of the medicine by this time, as if we were trying to poison her. She asked why we wouldn't take the same pills. But she did take it. And finally, fifteen minutes or so after her third pill, she calmed down. Schmidt went back to work, and I sat with her.

Four hours later she started to get agitated again, pleading "Help me!" over and over and over. So we gave her another pill. More and more, when she talks she is inarticulate and too faint for us to hear her well. Then when we can hear her, either she is repeating generic phrases like "Help me!" or else it makes no sense—like she is talking in her sleep.

For the last few days there have been isolated moments when she has seen the comforter on her bed as a dead body.