Famous last words.

Me, to DD's psychologist: I have been so incredibly lucky that with three people in my life who need huge amounts of help, they only seem to get unstable one at a time.

Why on earth would I say something stupid like that?????

You all know what happens when you say something like that....

DD is still very unstable. We had a meeting at the school so that the teachers could be aware of the situation. DD gets snotty and disrespectful every time I say something that isn't exactly what she wants. We are waiting to find out when our appointment is (for her to be re-evaluated for FASD). I honestly have no idea what is going on.

I did (fortunately or unfortunately) talk with one of my fellow Census workers (I think I told you I was going to be a part-time temporary Census worker?) who has an adopted son who is now 23 and living in a group home. His story (starting at about the time when his son hit age 16) sounded eerily like DD's. Tantrums, drama, and violence. On one hand, I felt good after talking with him, because I knew that what has been happening with DD probably has more to do with her (and her biology etc) than it does with us....but it made me sad and scared for the future, too. I guess I'm still grieving the fact that she will probably never grow up and be on her own. It's been tough for me to let go of that, no matter how much I fantasize about her not being in our house any more.

But wait!!! There's more!!!!
My mom is getting confused again. It's not a UTI (test was negative). Blood work at Dr.'s was all negative, too, so it could possibly be a "natural progression". She's having trouble following directions. Even simple ones. The other night I got to her apartment and she was in the bathroom. She couldn't remember how to wipe. Since she had just gone #1, I instructed her to wipe between her legs. So she started to wipe her ankles. I said "No, you've gotta wipe much higher than that." So she started to wipe her outer thigh. Then she said, "My arms are getting shorter. I can't reach to wipe any more." It made me so sad.

When we went to the doctor, we brought paperwork with us, just like usual. It has a list of her medications, her diagnoses, recent observations, etc. We've been bringing the paperwork to the doctor's office since she moved into her assisted living apartment 4 1/2 years ago. It's very much a routine. But this time, she was extremely worried about the papers, and kept asking me what was written on there about her. She told me it was "pointless" to bring those with us. She started to get angry.

We made it to the doctor's office, but they couldn't find anything wrong.

Then later that night, she decided to fill her cat's water dish. Her cat has one of those heavy self-waterers--it holds about a gallon of water and lets a small amount of water flow into the dish as needed--it was bought so that my mom would NOT try to fill it. So she (about a year ago) put out one of her porcelain dishes for cat water, so that she could fill it. I tried "helping" that bowl to disappear, because I could see what was going to happen eventually, but she always got frustrated and anxious when I did that, so finally, despite my knowing better, I let it stay.

She fell. She was filling that stupid porcelain water bowl. It broke all over. Luckily, my mom didn't break anything. She didn't even have a bruise. But it could have been terrible. I was glad the bowl was finally gone. Little did I know she would almost immediately find a "replacement bowl" in her cupboard. Argh.

Right now I don't know really how bad things are. I'm hoping it's just a "few bad days" in a row, and they'll go away and "normal" will be back.

Alzheimer's sucks.