"Busy!!!"

"I was busy!" - Okaasan's go-to excuse for staying at home ALL one glorious autumn day, and finally emerging at dusk along with the leftover Halloween bats and ghouls.


Busy?????!!!


Haven't laughed so much in ages. Both of us. Howled at that one. As I washed up the lunchtime dishes she hadn't done and he unloaded shopping from the car.


It was such a gloriously, off-the-chart huge lie. Can only laugh. And slave on.


We'd just come home from a Costco run, with the car bursting full of stuff to be unloaded. Just gone 5 pm at the end of a sunny, warm autumn day in Sapporo. The autumn leaves looked great, people were strolling in the parks, kids chasing leaves, everyone's mood lifted by the unseasonally warm day.


5 pm. Now dark. People heading home. End of the day.
Okaasan? In the entrance hall just about to go out.
We both commented on that as we came in and met her: why now? why didn't you go earlier? You missed the best weather today! etc etc.


"I was busy. That's why I am going out now."


This from a lady who we are 99% sure has sat in front of the TV since early morning. Probably stood up a few times to walk to the toilet and walked to the kitchen table for lunch. Maybe she brushed her hair. Looked at the newspaper. Looked at some old shopping receipts. Err....looked at a magazine. The TV. Lay down. Sat up. Lay down. Looked at a shopping receipt.


Of course that's all ok. At 80 plus you can have that kind of day if you feel like it. But the sheer confidence it takes to say: "I was busy!" as an off-the-top-of-the-head excuse for not doing something. 
Wonderful.


The dementia books talk a lot about "sun-downing", how dementia sufferers appear to get more active at the end of the day - so certainly Okaasan fits this pattern of doing nothing for hours and then finally at the end of the afternoon doing things.


And the barefaced lies - of course not conscious lies, but kind of automatic responses to a question. Okaasan doesn't know where she's just been or what he's just done a lot of the time, so if we ask (and all the advice is that you shouldn't ask), then she'll always say "Seicomart/SapporoStation/Seiyu/TanukiKohji/McDonalds", and it might be true, but not necessarily so. It's just her brain supplying a stock answer to that situation.
In one book I read, a lady was always telling visitors: "I've just come back from holiday in Cornwall", much to their confusion as she had actually been in a carehome for a year, and hadn't been travelling for years before that either.


So. "Busy". The new "Vegging Out by the TV". I like that kind of busy....


* But! I will be able to track Okaasan from now on, with that wonderful GPS system linked to her cell phone. Yujiro's new lover - his many-function AU mobile phone - enables us to use the GPS system via the house computer.
I've called it "Okaasan Hunter" on our desktop, and from now on I can check where she is and how long until she appears for dinner.
She doesn't in fact get lost now, that happened a lot when we first moved here. And her walking world is much smaller than a year ago. But still...it will be fun to be a snoop and see where she's at. :-)

Coming...and going.

Okaasan managed to give us new confusions last night.


I got home just after 6 pm.
Okaasan's shoes were in the entrance hall, facing the step where she'd stepped out of them.
Yujiro was upstairs half way down his first beer after work.
He and I chatted in front of the Tv a while.
Then I went downstairs to throw together dinner..."Okaasan's home isn't she?" I asked him..."Yes, she said she'd just got home just before I came back" he said.


Ok. Great. Everyone home. Start making dinner.


In the kitchen I did a quick "hello" to Okaasan in her room before I started dinner prepping. Okaasan was in her clothes and fussing around with bag and scarf.


Then she appeared in the kitchen...heading for the door.....handbag and scarf all set.


"Err? Are you going out again? I thought you just came back?"
"Just came back? No, I haven't been out yet....I'm just going to the Seicomart, I'll be back soon....."
"Err...dinner is in 30 mins. I thought you'd been out already!"
"Me? no.....I haven't been out yet today.."


And off she went. Again? Or for the first time?
We don't know. And she doesn't either.
This is the amazing thing about dementia sufferers: they can tell you something with such confidence that you don't suspect it isn't true. It isn't a lie, it isn't necessarily that they don't remember - more that they say what is expected or what people usually say in a given situation.


So when Yujiro got home Okaasan told him she too had just got home...and when she saw me 30 mins later she told me...I'm just going out, haven't been out all day.


I don't think she would have the energy to go out twice, so I'm guessing the first statement was not true...but the second was. Although...her shoes were in the entrance hall facing the "in" direction....


Confused? We all are.

No Dinner as normal.

Weird can get normal eventually.
Just another night...Okaasan buys a bunch of stuff during the day and eats it, leaves it around her room and the kitchen - although thankfully this time she put the scallops INSIDE the fridge.
At 6 pm she decides to go out for a walk again. We remind her about 7 pm dinner.
At 7 pm I am cooking dinner.

Yujiro calls her: she is in Macdonalds down the road having a coffee and...
Comes home and bringing her chicken McNuggets in a napkin.
She flops down at the kitchen table.
I start serving dinner.
"No, I'm not hungry...no...nothing for me."
We sit and eat the scallops...the eel that I bought....and Okaasan sits acoss the table and chats a bit. Occasionally she looks around the kitchen as if wondering where she is and why she isn't eating. But when we offer food she says "no".
We finish our dinner. We clear the table. She goes into her room and watches Tv, and sleeps. We go upstairs and watch our Tv and sleep.

Another increasingly typical evening in our home.
We could almost not bother cooking for her. But then sometimes she eats. But about 3 nights a week she doesn't. We have to have the miso soup and rice ready in case she does, because you can be sure the night we have cheese fondue all cooked up for us alone - will be a night when she DOES want to eat.
No way to stop her going out and buying stuff at the end of the afternoon.

*  News from England. My step-mum had her polyp operation. She is ok. But has low blood pressure and  they may give her a blood transfusion...