.
Roller Coaster Weekend

This has been a topsy-turvy weekend. One moment I am feeling happy, the next I am upset, the next I am ok, etc. I would like to get a sembelance of it all down, so I am going to write a list, to get down essential details:

Start - Friday (around 3pm)

1. Go to visit my elderly father-in-law.

2. Offer to take him around to places we like to visit.

3. He is feeling tired so we end up staying at his house.

4. We have a few drinks and a few pipes and chat.

5. I travel home.

6. My wife mentions to me when I get home that my mother is acting a bit odd.

7. My mother denies anything is wrong.

8. My mother falls asleep while doing her albuteral (breathing) treatments.

9. After I clean up the kitchen with my wife, we go to sit down, Mom, who went in before us, has already fallen asleep.

10. Saturday morning arrives.

11. My wife and I go travel around shopping a bit. I am able to spend some time in Harbor Freight. In case there is no such beast of a store near you, it is a veritable "candy shop" for people who like tools and gadgets of all sorts. I can easily spend 4-5 hours in there much to the chagrin of my wife. On Saturday, I spent roughly 45 minutes in there.

12. After we return home, I see my mother, who again is very sleepy. I quietly nudge up the LPM on my mother's oxygen concentrator.

13. On of my sisters and a nephew stop by unexpectedly, creating all manner of chaos (Oh, is mom not feeling well? She is on her oxygen.... etc) It again reiterates to me how little they know or understand the day-to-day activities we have here in the household. Mom has not been off her oxygen more than an hour or two at a time since leaving the hospital. My nephew wants to show me the very expensive civil war re-enactment, black powder rifle he received as a birthday present.

14. We decide to go to Saturday Mass.

15. I vow to try to stop worrying about what is going on with my elderly mother, and to stop trying to figure out what she is not telling us.

Lets cut to the chase...

More of the same continues to happen. Sunday starts out uneventful. Then this afternoon, as I get to the time in the afternoon where my mother should take her second diuretic pill (of the three she takes in a day) and her potassium pill... she says she took them a couple hours earlier. I am very frustrated because I had explained to her the importance of spacing out the intervals between dosages. She becomes defensive. I go to her medicine cabinet...

AND I FIND ALL THE PILLS SHE JUST TOLD ME SHE HAD TAKEN!!!!!!!

Now I am more worried and upset. She claims she has taken some (who the hell knows what kind) pills, but that her afternoon pills (which are the ones she claimed to have taken) are still in their spot in the pill tray.

I try as hard as I can to control my fear/anger/frustration, but am not entirely successful. I try to quiz my mother on what she took, when she took it, what the pills look like, etc. This makes her more defensive and she becomes angry at me and refuses to speak to me.

I feel as if I am going to go insane.

The best I can tell is my mother apparently imagined taking the pills while eating a Christmas cookie, but in reality she did not take them. Of course, this is only speculation, but after this many hours (it is about 8 hours later), if that is not what she had done, there would have been some sort of negative repurcussions that we would have noticed by now.

Medications are a very huge challenge. My mother used to be able to handle all her medication needs (up until about 4 years ago). Gradually over the last three years, mistakes have begun to spring up, that have necessitated me taking over the duty of filling her various pill chambers (in her weekly pill tender) so that all she has to do is open the compartment at the right time and take the pills inside. I have been setting up all the pills, all the various permutations of changes in perscription, all of the various mail-order b*llsh*t paperwork for her perscriptions for the last 3.5 years, and it is actually quite time-consuming work.

Now it appears I am losing the ability to have faith or confidence in my mother simply TAKING her medications at the times necessary. When I speak of various plans, my mother becomes irate and tells me to not "treat her like a child". And then this is usually followed again by some more silent treatment from her. I am very frustrated and anticipate that no matter what I chose to do about her medications, it will only get worse.

Sorry for the rush job. Not the most effective story. I just needed to get the damn frustration out and onto this electronic paper. I apologize for the lack of hooks in the story and for a lack of more creative word usage.

PipeTobacco