Let the winter begin!

I'm READY!

In my dorky hat and ski gloves, with my monster machine of a snow blower - I am ready for what winter throws at me!

And also ready: for a 10 day starter stretch of time looking after Okaasan alone.

Dear Son's ski teaching schedule changed and he left today for the mountains.

Alone with Okaasan. Here we go again. This is my winter :-)

But not alone now - I have kind, helpful wonderful day care. They will take Okaasan twice a week for dance, lunch, bath and chat. I have end-of-year parties, I have classes. And I have a car. And a snow blower.

And two cats.

On our last day (for a while) as a family we went for lunch at a local curry place. Okaasan was happy to eat her way through a huge vegetable curry, and she clung on to Dear Son's hand as we walked thru the snow to the restaurant.

Because Sapporo now has snow. It snowed all day Friday - non-stop like one of those shake-snow balls with a Christmas scene. And then at 5 pm it turned into a blizzard. A real, howling blizzard. Amazing to see it in an urban area.

I only had to drive 1 km home, but it was scary. I could only see the tail lights of the car in  front. And nothing at the side. Fleeting glimpses of shop lights flickered thru the whirling snow. The car shook.

So this morning: my debut with the snow blower that he bought off the Internet cheaply...made in China....he is using our old car for ski work and on the few times he is home during winter we need two parking spaces at the house. The lawn - usually buried in a meter of snow - has to be kept clear. I can't do it by muscle power alone....

And so.

Another winter as the solo carer for Okaasan. Long dinners together as she chats on about fish, and wartime memories and I try to judge how long more I have to stay and chat. It IS a responsibility; everything that will happen to Okaasan in the next 10 days is my decision and doing - what she eats, what she wears, where she goes...and of course HOW she feels.

I'm getting better at it. Maybe there won't be any more peeing in the trash box as I hide upstairs. Maybe.

But there'll be wine.

And chocolate.

And white lies as I escape to have lunch or dinner alone.

Hope you'll stick around :-)

My beautiful laundrette

Thankyou all!
I've been off doing something called Life. Hadn't checked in here for a while, and Comments Awaiting Moderation hadn't forwarded into my email - so there was a little rush of friendly comments when I just logged in here.
Thankyou :-)

And here we are - getting into December and all the usual end-of-year panic.

And.

Skiiiiiing...................................................

Back at the ranch of underpants and old newspapers: Okaasan had a laundry day. A very rare occurrence.

A year? Maybe 2 years ago - she would take some of dirty clothes into the bathroom, either when she was having a bath, or just to do laundry. She'd hand wash everything and rinse them in the bath and spin dry them in the machine. Then she would take the clothes in a bowl into her room or outside to the line and ever so carefully hang them up to dry. Later take them down and fold them up, unfold and refold several times...and leave them around her room to get mixed in with the remaining dirty clothes...

Now: the clothes mount up in the two laundry boxes in her room, and around on the sofa and carpet and table. I sweep in when she is out and grab what I can to do it all in the washing machine and hang them up upstairs in our apartment. I iron/fold and give them back to her. Very occasionally she will wash a pair of underpants, or wash stuff at day care and bring it home wet in a plastic bag.....to be forgotten for days unless I happen to hunt thru the bag.

Last week I tried a different tactic: "Oh Okaasan! Look, your wet clothes from day center! In a bag! What shall we do? Do you want to wash them?"

"Wash clothes? It's too cold...."

I heated the kitchen and bathroom.

"Wash clothes now?"

I gave her the washing powder and bowls.

I put the bags of wet knickers on the carpet in the entrance to her room.

And finally she did.

I say finally, because it turned into a two or three hour event: first she got dressed, then she sorted thru ALL her clothes and tried to decide what was dirty. Then she opened the bags with a few knickers in them, and lots of other stuff and set to on an orgy of handwashing and rinsing and hanging.

Really: hours. I left for work. I left her lunch flasks out. Dear Son came home from ski teaching and Okaasan was still doing it all.

I thought I was encouraging her to just open the bags and wash the few knickers. But once she got the idea of "laundry" in mind she was locked into the Full Wash Cycle. Couldn't stop once started.

It was good for her: mentally and physically. I should prompt her to do it more often. Really. In fact, it made me admit to myself that she should be having a bath at home (and doing laundry) at least once a week. Since she started daycare we haven't been bothering to get her to bath at home. Twice a week she goes to day care. But, we should be making her bath at home at weekends when we are around to check safety etc. We really should. She sits and stares at the Tv for so many hours.

Apart from that? I took her twice to the local supermarket and left her wandering around inside for an hour, with instructions to phone us when she was ready to come home. 

Her legs are so much weaker. She walks with a shopping trolley for support. She complains about knee pains. So different from the hours and hours downtown she was doing earlier this year.

Maybe another trip to the laying on of hot hands and chatting treatment?

Actually, although I am still a skeptic about it - I went back to that place myself last week. I had some scary repeats of my thigh earthquakes. Was it stress or dehydration? Don't know. But the young woman with hot hands and a sympathetic ear made me relax.

maybe Okaasan should go back.

:-( Toilet problems are increasing....

The towel that Okaasan is using under her body when sleeping is wet with urine almost every day. I've bought a bedsheet from the drugstore, it looks enough like a sheet that hopefully she won't know what it is for and refuse to use it. It soaks in urine and can be washed easily. ;-(

Japanese Test....

...yeah...well.....

If they had questions about "You'd like to get up off the carpet and put on clothes and go to day service, wouldn't you?" - then I'd have aced the thing!

But instead Level 4 had things about Kenji and whether Takashi-san had helped him with his studies, or whether the hotel reservation is Y10,000 a night on the Internet.

Who knows? The reading was easier than I expected - the long passage was a letter from an old person thanking the junior high school students who came to help him, and the listening was easy for me because I listen to Dear Son's daily dinner lectures about all-things-under-the-sun. 
But the kanji.....ahh.....I hadn't studied enough higher level kanji really. And it was questions that didn't allow guesswork,, so I used that time honored test taking technique - choose c).

Anyway.
December 2 2008. That's when it all started.....I was furnishing an apartment ready for my boyfriend's mother, who was moving to Sapporo to live next door to us. I was wondering what to cook for dinner (things never change!) and my life as an Oyomesan was about to start...

Down memory lane...
Okaasan and Me....the first day...

Dementia views

HI!
A few hours from now I will be taking Level 4 of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test at Hokkaido University. Trying to improve my language skills so I can be a volunteer at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

So, I should be studying. Cramming. Trying to get my ga's, ni's, kara's in order.

But I'm here instead, cos it's more relaxing. :-)

Was my last posting a whole week ago? Where did all that time go?

What on earth happened in the past week?

Right......it was Dear Son's birthday! He became fifty five years old. Absolutely ancient. I took him out for cheese fondue and red wine. 

What else? I was still recovering from the Tokyo lurgy, so operating on half energy for much of the week. I still have a pile of stuff on the table that I took out of my handbag pre-Tokyo - haven't had the energy/interest in putting it all back in there again.

I'm getting like Okaasan.

Oh! And blog reader K-san and her family came to stay!!! Via Couch Surfing, the people to people homestay website. I think she looked on CS and suddenly realised the British woman in that host profile - is the same woman living with that old lady and cooking tofu in a million different ways. We had a sushi dinner out with her and her husband and children, but not really enough time to chat about Okaasan and Me and our lives. But still, nice to know there are real people out there reading these ramblings and enjoying them.

Okaasan good this week. She went to day care twice - although stuck again on the thought: "I go there twice a week? Really? twice a week?", but she got up when reminded and got ready and went. Apparently she saw "someone" at the front door and actually greeted them....although there was nobody there because the driver and Dear Son were chatting by the car.

Day center recently have asked us to send Okaasan along with an extra pair of black trousers, because the toilet accidents are more frequent and they need to change her into clean clothes. At first we were handing over the extra clothes surreptitiously to the pick-up driver. Now we just do it directly and if Okaasan asks we say "clothes for after your bath", and she accepts it. I went and bought another pair of black trousers, so there are 4 in rotation - worn/being cleaned/extra/lurking in her room. The night before going to Tokyo I was sewing the hem of the new pair - my duties as Oyomesan :-)

Experts talking dementia and home care.

Last week NHK Tv broadcast a special program about dementia and care in the family. A retired producer had videotaped his mother over many years at home, from the start of her dementia to the sad, last gasps in hospital as she died aged 99. 

Many of my students - middle aged and elderly people - watched it and commented on it. We recorded it and finally got to watch it last night. Dear Son and I.

Oh, the familiar scenes.

The Okaasan in the program had lived alone for many years after her husband died, independent and healthy. But a good neighbor noticed strange behavior first about money management and housekeeping, and less and less cooking.

It sounded so familiar.

Then there was a period when the family were pre-cooking trays of food and leaving How to Cook in the Microwave Oven instructions, and going in to clean and sort out a messy house.

Then there were toilet accidents. Shit everywhere. And the Okaasan very surprised about it - reminded me of my conversations here last year? with Okaasan about soiled underwear.

And then loss of mobility after a stay in hospital, and more toilet accidents, and confusion...and feeding, and dressing.....and decline.

Of course, there were funny and happy scenes as the mother and son laughed and talked. The studio experts said how important it was to have routine and normal family life.

The producer and his mum.

As the program was finishing I glanced at Dear Son and realized: he was crying.

I comforted him and reassured him we were doing great. HE is doing great. These years now are forming a bond so that when we have the hard times ahead with Okaasan care, she will trust us and we will support eachother. It's all ok.

One of my students who commented on this program is in her late 70s. Fiercely independent and able.

"All this stuff now about dementia being a sickness, you know...years ago nobody said that. It was just accepted as one of the things about getting older, so people just helped and understood and did what they could...it's how we should think..."

I agree with her. To an extent. It is just a stage of getting older, but it is also more than that. The person with dementia is kind of protected within the sickness, they don't know the limits of their life - that they haven't eaten, or brushed their teeth or hair, that outside is cold and not T-shirt weather, that they have bought 5 pots of the same yogurt, that there is rotting food under the newspaper, that there IS no man standing outside the door at night.....for the family/carers these are the things to help with and gently guide around.

The TV program reminded me what may be ahead for us. The toilet accidents, for sure. Now Okaasan regularly pisses in her multi-layer pants, and about once or twice a week there is shit on the toilet floor or in her clothes. She tries to clean herself up, she hides the soiled clothes in her room. And forgets them. I go in and find them and wash or throw them away.

I think we are nearing the time to get some kind of sleeping mat or sheet - so that we can keep her sleeping and sitting area clean.

Okaasan sleeps on the floor between the sofa and the heated table, under the heater blanket. Under her body is just carpet and wood flooring, and usually a towel.

We gave her a futon when she first came here, but she has never, ever used it. She watches TV in the evening, sitting on the floor under the table blanket. And then sleeps there too. A few times she sleeps on the sofa. Usually the floor - she is Japanese, afterall.

But the toilet accidents are increasing and a easy-to-clean mat would be a good idea...

She hasn't tried to cook (heat rice/egg/water) in  a pan for many months. She hardly washes her own clothes anymore.

But she dresses herself, usually successfully. She keeps some kind of order on her table. She (eventually) puts away piles of washed clothes and she takes part in conversations.

Next week? December 3rd maybe? It is FIVE years since Okaasan came to live with us. Five years since this blog started.

We have done so much to make Okaasan's life better. If she was still living alone in her home in Saitama I think her dementia would be much worse. Actually I think she would be incapable of reason by now. So we have extended her happy, calm life by our care.

I thought - naively - she may live only 3 or 4 years when she first came....

In the NHK program that lady lived to be 99!

Okaasan is 83 now. Plenty more years left in her.

I think I'll be blogging for a while yet....

now....what shall I do with the rest of my Sunday???

Hmm.......