Mom & Me Four Archive

• Dinner last night: Buffalo wings, cottage cheese and V-8 juice.
• Dinner tonight: Halibut, shrimp and California (which I guess is vegetable) sushi with an Italian dressed side salad containing greens, avocado, winter squash and zucchini, Bermuda onion and carrot, feta and Parmesan. Also, later, a piece of pumpkin pecan pie. I'm surprised she asked for it. I didn't think she realized we had some of it in the freezer. The Halibut and shrimp sushi were very good; the California sushi, well, this particular place from which I bought the sushi apparently thinks the best way to stuff vegetables in a rice roll is to practically puree the things and add sugar. Both of us took one bite from the vegetable sushi and refused to eat the rest.
• BM tonight at 2230: Excellent volume, excellent consistency, very easy elimination, very easy clean-up.
• I should probably mention, she's been on 10 mg lisinopril first thing when she awakens and last thing before she retires for awhile, now; a little over a week, I think. A couple of days ago I upped her Benefiber dose by 1 tsp, so she's now getting 5 tsp in the morning.
• Walkering has been very regular. Yesterday we did the driveway, three laps. Today we did the local grocery and she declined to sit out the trip at their deli with coffee. She stopped to rest a couple of times by sitting on the walker seat, but was up and moving again within a few minutes. Surprised me. Surprised her, too. I keep her on a 2/lpm continuous flow (I wish the regulator allowed me to dial it to 3/lpm continuous...I'll probably look into this next week) when she's moving. When she's resting and catching her breath I switch her to 5/lpm pulse and watch her closely to make sure she keeps her mouth closed. Within a minute (I've timed it) she manages to catch her breath.
  Although she still complains when I usher her into movement every day, I can see the benefits. She's sleeping only 12 hours at night, sometimes a bit less; she's sleeping a maximum of 1.5 hours for her nap. She continues to remain fairly immobile in the house, but looks good.
• It's been awhile since I've taken regular stats. I suppose I should start again. Yesterday and today I took no stats at all. It occurred to me this afternoon that this may have something to do with her exceptionally bright mood of late...as well as the interviewing, the reading aloud and my generally brighter than usual mood (considering the relentless sunshine, that is, which is predicted to change this weekend then later in the week). I do mean to catch up over at The Dailies but, you know, I've had other stuff going on. The Stat Ketchup will be spotty, at best, since we've been playing fast and loose with stats since Christmas.

    I guess you've noticed, I've got a few more casts up. The best one, so far, has nothing to do with the questionnaire. If you have any interest in sampling what it's like to have Dementia-Lite or to live with and care for someone in the grips of Dementia-Lite, the best of the podcasts, the one with the asterisk, Who Am I? is a "must hear" cast. I think you'll find it entertaining, enlightening and far from tragic. A note about that cast: Although I'm fairly convinced that the reason she insists that I am 8 years younger than she is because her younger sister, whom she loved and with whom she continues to wish she had lots more time, is 8 years and one month younger than her, I also think that she is not "confusing" me with her sister (who has been dead since 1998) so much as thinking of her relationship with me as being the manifestation of the potential that existed in that relationship. She and her sister didn't really get to know each other until they were adults and then waited a long time to explore their relationship. Their exploration was cut short by her sister's illness and death. Mom was very clear during our conversation that I am not her sister. On that day she was thinking of me as having been around in her born-into home at the same time as her sister and joining her sister at their aunt's house during a period of crisis. I think, though, that she enjoys her relationship with me as much as she enjoyed what little relationship she was allowed to have with her sister and placing the two of us in parallel is expressing not only her pleasure in that relationship as well as this one with me but her truncated desires for her relationship with her sister. All of the people mentioned in that podcast except for my sisters are dead, by the way.
    In my limited experience with podcasting Mom & Me I'm discovering that although my mother enjoys being asked the questions in the questionnaire, they are incapable of provoking truly ruminative conversations between us. The further we go with this, and I expect this to become a regular activity simply because Mom loves being interviewed and talking about herself knowing that she's being taped, the more likely it will be that we will deviate from the questionnaire. It did not escape my notice that at the beginning of the Dementia-Lite interview she impatiently asked, "When are we going to start talking about what I do?" My guess is that she has yen to talk about her teaching career, so I'm designing an outline that will allow her to do just that. Serendipitously, we watched a show on one of the networks tonight, Stupid in America. Being a retired school teacher and an Ancient One with Dementia-Lite who thinks she is an active school teacher, this show really got her going. She loves to discuss education. I'm thinking this would be an excellent topic for a podcast.
    Although we began podcasting as a genealogical exercise and a sort of life review, I think it will be much more valuable, even genealogically, if we are flexible enough to mold the podcasts to serve what my mother wants to say and what I'd like to preserve about her rather than what a Life Review Questionnaire would have her say and me record. Yesterday, for instance, the day we recorded the Dementia-Lite interview, she was in what she would describe as a "rare mood" from the moment her feet hit the floor. She was so animated during bathing that I was sorry I hadn't bugged the bathroom with the computer and microphone. Our conversation would have made for yet another asterisked podcast. No, it wouldn't have been the same, not even interesting, if I'd brought the equipment in during the bathing process. Yesterday's bathing conversation would have been self-consciously monitored to its death if she'd known the equipment was up and running. I guess I'm going to have to tune myself to possibilities in advance. What a delightful prospect!
    Later.