Been a While

No, I haven't died. Too busy as the saying goes. No, it hasn't been too uneventful to write. Just too busy. I have good news for me, at least. I have cut back my hours at one of my jobs and now I will only work seven days a week and not eight. Enough about me, almost.

This week my wife and I are on vacation. My brother took Dad Friday night, Saturday and returned him Sunday afternoon. My bride and I went out of town for that time and had a good time. That created the least disruption for Dad. This week we are taking some nice day trips and our daughter is bringing over our grandson to welcome Dad home from day care each day. We get home in time for supper. Last night another of our daughters watched him during supper while we went out with friends. Vacation is turning out all right after all. Today my bride and I hiked 7 miles. The thermometer on the bank said 97 degrees. We concurred with that, but had a great time. Yesterday, despite the lingering effects of the midwest flooding, we got in 9 miles along a river trail. Even the family dog is getting a vacation as we take her hiking with us. Tomorrow, Thursday and Friday we are going for the long hikes. One of these days she is going to run away when she sees the leash come out.

Dad is showing more marked signs of decline. He is virtually unresponsive to most overtures of communication. The social worker saw him last week and said that he never answered any of her questions. He will start his own monologue and go on until his brain hits a glitch, but he doesn't respond to questions very well. My brother noted the same behavior at his house over the weekend. Then tonight, just to make us all feel that we have no idea what we are thinking or talking about, Dad chatted us all up at supper and answered all questions asked to him. That was right after he started his own monologue that made no sense. It was just a jumble of mixed sounds that weren't exactly words. We did have a good group show up for supper tonight, two daughters, a son in law, a daughter in law and a grandson. Dad had a good audience and he always like to shine for a crowd.

His confusion is increasing, crowd or not. He has become confused on people, events and relationships that he could still handle just a few months ago. He will confuse dreams with reality and has no ability to discern the difference. There is no rational way to help him with his discernment, so we have to live more and more in his altered stated of reality. The sometimes funny and challenging part is to remember what that reality is. He told both the social worker and my brother a quite fantastic story, fortunately this one was not to my discredit, which left them both wondering about its veracity. It was something he dreamed, I suppose, since it was so far from the mark of reality that I suppose I could actually disprove this one to him, but what is the point. That is how he sees it, and in the long run his misperception of reality will actually make my life easier. This one turns out well for me. My lucky day, and on vacation to boot. I have a ray of sunshine in his descent.

A little caregiver "wine"

It is still the lazy days of summer. Dad is pretty much in a routine. Pretty much meaning that nothing big is happening. He has been grousing a lot lately about having to go to the "place". As I have said before, if he doesn't have something to grouse about, he just isn't a happy man. It is irritating, though, to have him perpetually grouse about this particular thing. He has no options but to go. We have fought over this hill too many times and it is quite wearing to have him go on and on about it. This is the one issue that always becomes the most explosive, the one where he is most likely to sink in his heals and say, " I AM NOT GOING ANYMORE!!!!!" That happened last summer at the end our the vacation that my bride and I finally got to take after giving him 24/7 care for 9 months, and it has happened many times since then.

Now, it is summer time and we would like to go on vacation again. It sounds good in theory, but the fact is that it isn't going to happen. Last year we left him with my brother while we went on vacation. That meant that he got out of sync with his routine. When we got back from vacation he absolutely wouldn't go back to the "place". It took us nine months with many fierce battles to get him back to going 5 days a week as he had been doing. Aside from the visiting nurse, nobody really helped us with those battles. I do not want to have that happen again.

So now we face a "which is worse" situation. Is it worse after 12 months of 24/7 care to not get a vacation, or is it worse to go through what we went through last year. Any care outside the home, even respite care, changes his routine. In home care is not a current possibility. No siblings have risen to the rescue. The schedules of our children no longer allow it. Our youngest has graduated from high school (number one in her class of 400) and is off to college. So, do we grind on and grind down, or do we take a refresher with the known result that it will be harder when we get home than when we left? Do we take him with us and ruin our whole vacation and then still have to deal with him being out of routine when we get back? The questions persist and only those experienced in 24/7 care have a clue how we feel. The upside is that aside from grousing daily about going to that "place", Dad is still seemingly happy in the routine of his life. His is the sunshine in my descent.