27 Hours with Mom, but Who's Counting? Paranoia in Alzheimer's

Somehow I missed this from my diary.  (My diary consists of the sent file of e-letters to people I’m close to!)    Here I was writing to my sister Suzy and my son Jonathan.

Begun before 6:00.PM and sent on Sat, Mar 26, 2011 at 6:59 PM—(E-mail is so precise!)

Dear Suzy and Jonathan,

                I’m just back from 27 hours with Mom (but who’s counting!?), and here’s the report, starting at the end and going back.

                Mother’s paranoia never let up today, though for a few minutes—10 here, 5 there—we felt hope.  There was a changing-of-the-guard at 4:00 p.m., when Tom arrived, and she welcomed him very cordially and a few minutes later followed me to the back door and said something indicating that Tom was in cahoots with Kathy, and she didn’t think she’d be seeing me again.  Her refrains for the 11 hours today were “”You’ve got to get out of here” and “She’s going to kill me” and “I wouldn’t eat that if I were you,” and “she’s trying to kill us, don’t you know” and variations on this theme of not just her fear of a murder plot but her fear of her being the accused.

                From about 5:15 AM to 7:15 AM she told me about Kathy’s intent to kill her and make it look like she killed herself or someone else did it, so I’d better get out or Kathy would kill us both, and then she (Mom) would be blamed for it.  At one point I tried to make a pot of tea, but Mom took it away from me and said that it had been poisoned.  In spite of the paranoia, Kathy and I were able to get her to take the pills, but when she raised the shot glass to her mouth, she said, “Here’s to death.” 

                I think it was when I was reading about the budget cuts that would eliminate centers for the disabled, elderly and frail that Mom walked in this morning—around 5:15.  She told me immediately that I’d better get out fast because Kathy was trying to kill her, and she’d get me too. 

             She said, “I want you to remember because you’re—you’re a daughter of mine, aren’t you?” (much nicer than “You’re no daughter of mine”)  I told her I was, and I tried telling her that she was having a terrible nightmare brought on by Alzheimer’s, and I hugged her (and as you noticed, too, Suzy, she didn’t hug much back).  I tried quoting FDR, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” and for a few seconds I thought that was getting through.   She said, “It was easy for him to say that.”  I asked, “But you don’t think it was a good message for the whole nation?”  “”Yes, I do, since I’m more like the nation than FDR.”  I asked her why she thought Kathy was trying to kill her, and she said, “Because she’s kind of nuts.” 

            I interrupt this report to tell you about a call that just came in from Mom at 6:02 p.m.  She said she wasn’t going to blow the whistle on anybody, but she was very, very sad that she felt she was being killed and they were going to do some kind of trick to make it look like somebody else had done it.  But she’s been praying a lot to God.  

So…This morning Mom said that Kathy was kind of nuts and over the top and not of her right mind.    Kathy had turned against her and she would turn against me too.  She wanted me to find her a place near me in SF, and I explained that Pleasant Hill had a very nice residence that might have a place for her and be affordable, but SF did not.  She told me she didn’t think Kathy would agree to a place in PH because she had her reputation to think about, and she wouldn’t like the staff and other people to find out about her (Kathy).  For a few minutes she studied the tax return form she’d asked Kathy to print out for her last night, and she said, “This just doesn’t look right.  This is totally a fraud.  I never gave $4800 in miscellaneous charities.”  (At this point, I saw a second of lucidity!)  She told me Kathy would be mad because she (Mom) was getting back more of a refund than Kathy was.  Mom said “I don’t want to implicate you, but she’s going to kill both of us and she’s going to try to implicate you.”  When I told her that Kathy, like all of us, loved her, she said, “No she doesn’t.  She hates me…if I were in PH, Kathy could haunt me and turn people against me…if I leave it to her discretion, she’ll probably poison me.  She doesn’t want me to blab.”

                She told me last night that her glasses, something she used to feel pride about because they were colorful and bold, were strange for an old woman.  This morning she said, “Tina, get me some new glasses.  These are too frivolous and silly.”  She didn’t even want to wear them around the house, so I got her her green frame ones, and she wore those. 

                She offered the locked black medicine box as proof that Kathy was hiding evil intent, and when I reminded her that Kathy was protecting the medicine that Mom had tried to throw away a day or so ago, Mom said, “No.  Her plan is in that box.”   She also said, “It says that I killed you in the box.”  The murder plot was also in the pages of the tax return, which Mom told me had all the proof of their plot against her and her motive because Mom’s refund—bigger than Kathy’s-- had made Kathy so mad. 

                Other proof that Kathy was trying to poison her:  When Mom sort of agreed to have a wheat muffin and the dog tried to take it from Mom’s plate, Kathy cried, “Don’t’!  Don’t eat that!”  Aha!  So it was poisoned!  Mom asked me to wrap it up in a napkin and take it back to SF as proof of Kathy’s intent to kill her.  If she put it in the garbage there, Kathy would retrieve it.

                She kept thinking, too, that Kathy was poisoning the dog.   “I know she’s killed the dog.  I just know it.  And she’s going to blame it on me.”

                At lunch, which she wouldn’t eat, she prayed to God, and I can’t remember the exact words, but it was not the garden variety.  “God, you know all, so you know that I’m not the one who’s evil.  Please take the evil out of the hearts of these people who want to kill me, and please, please, turn their hearts from stone.”  Something like that.  She also said that God probably wouldn’t forgive us the way that Jesus would.  Jesus was just too good, but God wouldn’t forgive people who killed and blamed it on others.

                Mom told me, when Kathy wasn’t there, that it was so sad because she wanted people to remember her as someone who was really nice, not someone who killed people, the way Kathy would make them believe that she had.

                So, Suzy and Jonathan, it’s pretty clear that we’d better report Kathy to the authorities.  If only Mom hadn’t gotten that tax refund!

                No.  I know that this is no laughing matter.  And I’ve thought so often of what Kathy experienced first with her father, whose body she found after he’d shot himself, and then with her brother Dick, who stopped taking his meds for schizophrenia and wound up homeless and emaciated—he who had been head of the history department and writer of the definitive textbook.  I think he died of starvation.  Kathy doesn't bring up this previous trauma to me, and I’ve never mentioned it to her, but I think of it quite often.  I feel so much sympathy and admiration for her, and of course, I hate to see Mom’s suffering too.

             As you know, Javier has often commented on what good shape Mom is in, and he’d  never seen a sign of dementia.  So when I saw that I wouldn’t be back in SF in the afternoon, for our 4:00 date,  I invited him over.  Mom almost immediately told him that he’d better leave because she really liked him and didn’t want him to be killed and herself to be accused of murdering him.  She told him that almost everything in the kitchen had been sprayed with poison.  When she took her Mestanon at 2:00 (which she did!), she said, “One more link with death.” 

                Javier told me he thought Mom should be sedated.  The NP says that the danger of too much sedation is that they fall.  I feel that Mom has already toppled over.  I hate to see her suffer like this.  I’m really interested in your comment, Suzy, that if she were more sedated, she’d just be more terrified because she would have the nightmare paralysis when she’d try to act and wouldn’t be able to scream.  But I’m hoping that maybe some sedation could lessen the terror.  
            Mom played the piano for Javier but only one song, and then she turned off the piano sheet lamp and got up.  She read a little about Jessica of the well, who had turned 25, and the reporter mentioned that her parents had been teenagers struggling financially during the era when Jessica fell down the 22 -foot well.  I was hoping so much that  Mother wasn’t thinking that her parents had pushed her down the well. 

                I’m saddened and impressed by what Dee told us about never having seen an Alzheimer’s person who seemed really happy.

                I’m going back over tomorrow late afternoon and spend the night, and then Kathy and I will take Mom to an appointment with Dr. Johnson at 10:00 a.m.  I’ll stay with Kathy for as long as she  wants me to, though I might take a break when Nan is there.  Nan told me that last Wed. was the most difficult day she’d ever had with Mom.

                There were some good moments last night, but I’m too tired to relate them!

                Love,

                Tina/Mom