My father's now in a nursing home. For now they're rehabbing and evaluating him. We don't know how he can gain a permanent bed.
He never knows where he is. His deteriorating mind has made him a refugee. He can't even recognize his home of fifty years. When he was there he would frequently ask when we were going home. Before my siblings and I realized he needed twenty-four hour supervision, he would call my us late at night and ask if he could get a ride home.
For his being in a nursing home, his disorientation is probably a mixed blessing.
Now he can't even use a phone and doesn't know the difference between the phone and the channel changer. I would dial for him, but he still couldn't use it. A helper pointed out he was holding the receiver against his jaw and not his ear. Then he'd complain he wasn't hearing the person.
Oddly enough, at home he was in danger of forgetting he couldn't walk, ignoring his painful legs, getting up and wandering late at night, and then having a serious fall. That's why I had to sleep over. I stopped him two weeks ago trying to go upstairs with his walker, thinking his bed was there. Yes, he got out of his current bed, set-up on the first floor, and was going to look for his "real" bed on the second. Earlier that night, he could barely stand up. I had to support him.
As he went back to bed, his knee crackled, the joint being bone-on-bone. He asked me "Did you hear that?" I answered, "Yes, that's why going upstairs was a bad idea." A lesson he was bound to forget the next day.
I hope that his experience of this is like a series of dreams, where pain is dulled and unremembered in the next episode, and every bad experience is quickly dissolved in the peace of sleep.
No comments:
Post a Comment