Ongoing...with help.

Okaasan's painful leg drama is ongoing, but at least now we are sharing it with the daycare staff.

They came on Tuesday and checked that she was alive. She sat slumped under her heated table and grudgingly showed the staff her legs and knees. But she was lively enough.
Tuesday late afternoon she actually said she planned to go for a walk, but Dear Son stopped her because it was rainy and windy.
She ate lunch and dinner ok.
Then yesterday she started talking about going out - and I was encouraging her - from 4 pm onwards. Then she lay down on the carpet and dozed again...and again.
Finally at 6.30 pm she was talking about going out and we stopped her again: dark and dinner is in 30 mins.
We thought that was all a good sign - showing that she wanted to go out.

But this morning. Day care? Today?
No thankyou.
Dear Son was his usual insensitive self about asking her.....if she gives some rambling, confused answer he turns on his heel and walks out saying: "I don't understand you, you aren't making any sense!". It's a huge help to a dementia patient. Not.

Day care called for the Thursday outing and then sent the staff round at 9.45 am to see what Okaasan was up to. When she arrived I was in the last 10 mins before going to work - rushing around with a towel wrapped round me and cooking Okaasan some lunch for the flasks on the kitchen table.
The daycare staff tried to get Okaasan to go for a "little walk in the fresh air", but she refused...said she would just sit and the pain would go away, as it had in the past. Said she wouldn't eat anything, and the body would get better on its own etc etc
The staff were lively and determined, but Okaasan wasn't playing ball and they didn't force the issue.
But Okaasan was walking round her room when the lady came (well actually she had been crawling round her room on hands and knees JUST before), but she was more physically active.

And so. They left again and grinned understandingly at me...

It IS good that someone else is in on all of this (apart from you lot of course!!), some kind of person with training....who will monitor the situation.

Just have to let her be and see what happens. Tomorrow there is a 9 am dentist appointment. I look forward to seeing how Dear Son is going to get Okaasan to go to that.....

The irony is: sometimes she doesn't actually REMEMBER the whole pain-in-the-leg-drama at all. Yesterday afternoon I suggested that she shouldn't go too far for a walk because of Monday night's events - and she didn't remember anything about the station staff calling Dear Son, coming home by taxi and being carried into the house on a garden chair...and hopefully nothing too much about us shouting at her...

Sigh...

And yes, I forgot to write it. Understandably. Monday night was also the 4th anniversary of my dad's death. In fact the 4th anniversary of getting that phonecall from England to say the postman had found him on the living room carpet. They thought he'd died 2 days before.....
4 years ago. Seems like a lifetime. So much has happened, good and bad. So much.