Every Mother Is A Working Mother

This is a Long Post because I have Thoughts, but the short version is, "Hey, my mom had a stroke, and isn't just sedated to the gills! Though she is that, too."

Less telegraphic version: My mom (who just turned 86!) has progressed, in her dementia, from anxious and logical to anxious and tangential, in both technical and non-technical senses. That is to say, to people who don't know her, it seems as if she says basically random stuff, whereas to people who know her, it's clear she's saying stuff that has connections in her brain but she doesn't seem to recognize that she needs to provide the connective tissue to make it explicable to people outside herself.

Mostly, up until now, if she's not tired, she's quite audible and quite understandable. When tired, she gets a little blurry, but not *very*. (Also, and this is irrelevant except for med issues, she gets delusions. All of which are quite harmless, so far, and seem to mostly involve expecting visitors for dinner and the like. My dad says there's like, consistent expectations/background to this, and things.)

She and my dad are both very wary of assisted living and don't want anything to do with it, in part because of a friend of theirs who they felt had basically been stuck into a facility by her daughter. (Mind you, this friend had dementia and kept falling down, so, warranted.)

My mom's also wandering, or, rather, taking walks and then getting lost in her own neighborhood, which isn't *quite* the same thing, but kind of similar. One can ask why my dad lets her do that, to which the answer is, he sometimes needs to pay a bill or something and she gets impatient. She otherwise seems to not have many interests -- she's not reading much (or, I suppose, able to read), she's not watching movies, she's not... doing things. Other than taking walks.

So the point is, yesterday, she was taking her third walk of the day, alone, and someone called 911 because she was apparently walking in the middle of High St, aka, a very busy street with a *lot* of rush hour traffic. (When I heard this I had an actual chill run down my actual spine. Things that happen in real life! Who knew!) A police officer stopped by, and she was apparently combative and/or belligerent, so he brought her to the hospital. (The same one I volunteered at when I was a teenager, let us timewarp now.) It seemed odd to me that since she was *registered* as a wanderer, he'd take her to the hospital rather than home, but there's a few possibilities, some of which are stroke-related, some of which are dementia-related.

( More details about various visits. )

Anyway, so, clearly, what we need to do is get her into a rehab facility and get the support system set up for getting her back home, hopefully. We've got a "light housekeeping" person coming in starting about a week from now, and I can call some nursing folks her doctor recommended, so, we have Planz.

In more emotional aspects of stuff, this now starts another kind of slippery slope toward possibilities like pneumonia and other things. And I don't want my mom to *die*, but on the other hand she's been telling my dad she's unhappy and doesn't want to exist anymore (though doesn't have any kind of inclination to kill herself), so I mean. If this starts that faster downhill slope, I'll be *sad*, but I'm not going to cling if she's wanting to slowly go that direction. Just. I'll be sad. I *am* sad. Sadness is.