familyvalues

My mother is not actually (yet) a wanderer, dementia-wise, though she is accident prone, which is basically the functional equivalent.

(Apparently, especially with sundowners, people do just. Wander a lot, and also there is the subsection of them who want to find old homes that no longer exist and/or they no longer live in.)

The first time this seemed wandering-esque, last month, it was that she had gone out to, presumably, get ice around 5 am at night in a hotel. (She and my dad were going to an archeo-astronomy convention). She then forgot her room number and hadn't brought her room key with her, but she eventually found the front desk, and they called my dad. ....who hung up the phone on them because he was 3/4 asleep. So my mom and the front desk clerk went and banged on the door of their room, several times. (She then forgot the part about their having called my dad until several days later when I was talking to them about it. This is the problem with reconstructing events, sometimes she doesn't remember a recent thing has happened at all, and then sometimes, 10 minutes later, she remembers both the event and a particular detail, and it's never predictable which way it'll go.

However, I would like to praise her problem solving skills on the night of the event, there.)

The second time this happened was last week, which my father reported to my brother and I as her "losing her car keys," but what actually happened was she locked them (and her purse) inside the car outside her local pharmacy, and since she didn't have her cell phone on her (she never does, is the problem), she went inside the pharmacy and asked to use their phone (again, top tier problem solving skills, but I suspect she had to do a lot of hemming and hawing about it because she's become *even more* unable to get to the point of her questions/train of thought than she used to be.) First, she called my dad, who called AAA for her. I lose track of the narrative a bit here, but I think basically, AAA took awhile so she got impatient, then the pharmacy called Riverside Community Care Elderly Services, who called the Dedham Police, who called the Dedham Fire Department, who kindly broke into her car for her. Riverside then followed my mom home and offered my dad their Elderly Services brochure, and said they'd call Monday, and my dad was sad because dementia, and also he wants to deal In His Own Way, and I suspect also because my mom had become Obvious To Their Hometown.

(They did not call today.)

Anyway, so my brother and I stopped by today to have dessert and commiserate with them, and we are inching toward my dad being OK with getting a 3-ish-days-a-week helper, which would assist *infinitely* with dinner, which causes a lot of stress because my mom thinks she can still be organized enough to cook and she isn't.

I also, today, registered her as a wanderer with the Dedham Police, or anyway, that's what the form focuses on, but it's serves just as well as, "Please return this person if she's having troubles." Really, what she *is* is a a) deaf, and b) a source of confusion for people who run into her in stressful and/or confusing situations, because she takes shortcuts in her brain, doesn't let other people in on the shortcut, and also, as noted, no longer asks questions that give people enough clues to figure out either the answer or the question. So she may occasionally functionally *act* like a wanderer even before she becomes one, and if the Dedham Police know this, so much the better.

The point of this post is, I dun' like it.