Suzy Visits Mom, Who's Responsible for Kay

Suzy Shares Her Visit with Mom, Responsible for Kay

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Well, when I got there, Mom opened her door a crack and said it was nice of me to come visit but she was on a death watch so I couldn't come in.

I think she would have stuck to that, perhaps, but Adele, in her usual very friendly way, came up (I'd greeted her in passing on my way back to Mom's room) and was excited to see me and wanted to visit. I don't know if this simply normalized things for Mother or made her want something someone else wanted. : )

 So Mom told me I could come in, after all, for a moment. Mother was paranoid and the usual amt of bizarre at first. She didn't have her teeth in, and I asked her about them. Again she thought she'd lost them, or maybe, she said, someone took them.

We looked in her drawers. At some point, she saw her lipstick and put it on, a bit cockeyed. Then I checked for the teeth in the bathroom, and there they were, right in their container in the medicine closet. She put them in, and all was well.

Kay was sitting in her chair, and when I greeted her, was appropriately polite. I sat on an extra chair they have in there now, and Mother lay on her bed and we worked on a crossword puzzle.

Kaywas not participating, was kind of zoning out, or just chilling, perhaps.

 Mother would admonish me to keep my voice down sometimes. Another time she said, She's dead, isn't she? When, in fact, it was a time that Kaywas actually swinging her leg.

The principal delusion last night was the one that Kay was going to have visitors who would arrive any minute and I'd have to scram. Kaykept thinking she heard knocking and would get up to see, when there hadn't been any noise that I discerned. But Mother was totally in that delusion with Kay. They call that folie a deux!

And then there was the time Kay went to check out the door. Kay said, “I'm going to go open the door and run!”

 Mother wearily got up and said, “What's she doing? I'm responsible for her.”

An additional interesting thing is that Mom wanted to turn on a lamp by Kay’s chair, but it didn't go on. I saw that there was no lightbulb in it. I tried the lamp on the table on the other side of Mother's chair, but it had no lightbulb in it either. When I saw a tech in the hall, I told him that neither lamp had a lightbulb, and he said Mom and Kay have taken them out. Wonder what that's about?! But that he'd put new ones in.

And that's it. She was clearly tired. It was, after all, after work, so the visit was about 7 to 8. She wasn't much into hugs. Adele was much more affectionate than Mom. Wouldn't it be nice for Mom if her illness manifested more like Adele's where there's the big memory problem, yes, but not the paranoid delusions and intense fear.