This whole blogging thing is still fairly new to me so the four of you who are reading this will have to bear with me while I figure things out. I originally started this blog in order to write about my mother’s dementia and try to make sense of my life as her caretaker. I don’t know how much to post or share on this blog. I don’t want to scare people away, yet I want to be honest. I try to write all posts with a sense of humor, but sometimes things just aren’t funny. Again, bear with me and read at your own risk. I may lose a friend or two from all of my oversharing, but that’s life.
A little over two years ago, my mother started becoming more paranoid and almost manic. She started telling me that people were following her and telling her to move out of our house. She started talking to herself constantly. I spent June 18, 2014 (my birthday) listening to my mom talk to two people no one else could see. She told me it was a man and a woman, her two best friends. That day my mom talked to herself from 6 a.m until 11 p.m when she finally fell asleep. She also spent part of that day setting out plates for herself and her two friends. She poured them each a cup of coffee and offered them cookies. She completely ignored me, a real person, even telling me to leave so she could spend some time alone with the voices in her head. There were many days I would come home from work and my mom would be making dinner for her fake friends. “Dinner” was a cup of flour mixed with cold water because she kept forgetting what she wanted to make. Eventually, my husband and I took the dials off the stove for fear she would burn the house down.
During this time, I called every respectable psychiatrist in the city of Milwaukee. They either weren’t accepting new patients or weren’t accepting Medicare patients. My husband and I finally took my mom to the hospital ER. After a couple more months of tests and pure living hell, she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Quite honestly, I believe my mom has dementia stemming from schizophrenia but since I don’t have a medical degree it’s been impossible to find a doctor willing to listen to me. I have learned more about mental illness and the medical field in the last two years than I ever thought possible. I have had to fight (not literally, of course) a couple different doctors to get my mom on the right medication. In the early stages of her illness, my mom was very abusive towards me: hitting me, swearing at me, telling me that the voices in her head told her I was a drug addict. There were days I wished I was a drug addict. Drugs would at least be an escape from the nightmare I was living in.
I pride myself on having a decent sense of humor. I try to find the lighter side of most situations because without humor there’s no hope. Sometimes I use humor as a defense mechanism. During this time, I became a mental patient as well. I was a basket case, trying to be a daughter, a mother, and a wife, failing miserably at all three. I wanted to help my mom because she deserved it. She put me before herself every day of her life before this illness took over. How could I possibly abandon her? This put a strain on my marriage like you wouldn’t believe, but somehow we made it through. Probably because my husband is amazing.
My mother has talked to bushes, walked into oncoming traffic, and tried to escape our house during her “wandering” phase. Luckily, this is mostly controlled now due to the medication she is on. The hardest part now is remembering the woman she used to be and seeing the woman she is. At least I can still enjoy her personality on the days it shines through. For that, I am grateful.