This picture is from May 2021 when I drove Mom to meet up with my granddaughter, Christine, and her great-granddaughters Taylor, Laken, Blakely, and Emersyn.
I'm sure I'll randomly go back to things I missed. One of them is the problem with confusion about or missing medication. I had learned when I began visiting my Mom each week that her medication was confusing her. There were even a few times when she would call me with back pain and be so upset about her pain that I would have to go there immediately and pick her up to come stay with us for a few days. She has back pain from time to time when she is up too much and doing more than her normal amount of activity. My aunt told me one of my Mom's new tricks was to get down on the floor to pick up fuzz off of the rug. This was constantly causing back issues for her. I decided I would buy her a super light stick vacuum that she could use rather than bending down and picking at the rug. It seemed like a great idea to me but I doubt she ever used it. It's funny how we try to come up with solutions based on logical thinking and not realizing that her brain was no longer working that way. She continued to bend over and pick at the rug. She continued to have back aches. She continued to be confused about where her pain medication was.
At some point during my visits, I decided that I would take over filling her daily medication box for her. That way she would remember that she had taken her pills, right? Each week I would fill her pill box out for each day and then I would leave out just the pain pill bottle that she used for her back aches. Sometimes when she had pain and would call me, I could talk her through taking two of the pain pills. Other times it just seemed not to work and I would end up having to drive over there.
Above picture is Mom and her cat Darlin' at her home in Hartsville. She could never remember that poor cat's name. I would have to remind her of it often during our phone calls or visits. You could see she was starting to look a bit disheveled. I'm sure that is something else that I guess I should have recognized.
Upon my visits, I would fill her pill box and I often found that she had taken medication for other days. So if I had filled it on a Friday the week before and had come the following Tuesday, she should have still had medication in the slots for Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday but some would be missing. It turned out that this was happening because she would go to bed at 4pm, and wake up at 7pm thinking it was morning. She would put on coffee and take her medicine. Once she turned on her TV, she would realize it was evening and she would go back to bed. The next morning, her medicine would be missing so she would either skip it or take the following days medicine. I realized this the night I stayed with her all night so that I could drive her early for blood work in the following morning. One of her medications was blood thinner and should have been monitored so that she was not taking too much of it. I left so stupid once I realized this. Maybe my aunt could come down in the morning and help to make sure she had taken the correct days pills. The problem with that was Mom had been so Independent and didn't really want her down there and all up in her business. To be honest she probably didn't want me all up in her business but I'm pretty stubborn when it comes to making sure she did the right thing. I'm not sure if this was a fault or a talent but I was certainly determined!
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