Dementia update (Long, sorry.)→[More:]I've been putting this off as stuff happened, but I guess I need to get it off my chest eventually.

So my dad finally got sick enough (in his mind) to see his G.P. almost two months ago. We had been pushing him for a year. (When he went almost 18 months ago, she gave a note of concern my mother passed her short shrift, asked him some "president/year" types of questions, and sent him on his way. We weren't happy then.) In February, he had basically taken himself to bed and hardly ever got out. (His mother did the exact same thing. It's like the ultimate passive-aggressive move.) Now, he was showing various physical signs that led the G.P.'s second to diagnose diabetes (he had been pre-diabetic for several years, and used to do things to maintain his weight and sugar intake). She was also very concerned about his cognitive state, as he had started to have real trouble with names of people and things as well as general focus (e.g. on a conversation). Both of those could easily be exacerbated by his self-treatment, which included drinking lots of cough syrup, grape juice, and wine.

Well, they wanted to see him in a month after he'd had 30 days on -- I think the new one is synthroid, for his thyroid. But he came up with excuse after excuse for not getting this set up with the pharmacy. (Unhelpfully, my mother's union just switched to Express Scripts, and he had become quite organized at Walgreen's Online, and just didn't seem to want to effect the paperwork.) They wanted a follow-up, but if he wasn't on the meds, there was no point -- they need to have a baseline. Without being able to rule out causes, they can't diagnose Alzheimer's or anything else.

So then my mother, ten days ago, had a close encounter with a broken sidewalk, and almost lost a tooth. While she was getting her gum stitched up at Urgent Care, he developed severe abdominal pains, and made an appointment -- then cancelled it, because it went away -- then decided he couldn't get out of the lobby chair and needed to have his appointment after all. Well, it turns out he had a hernia.

So Thursday he was to go in at 7am for the surgery. My mom was to drop him off and I was to be on call to pick him up. But she got me out of bed (yawn--er, what?) because he was so confused that morning as well as unsteady on his feet. We took him in and after she checked out with her boss she came back.

We both remembered his cancer surgery (2002, I think) and how long it took him to recover, and we both expected this could be an ordeal for him now and he might bounce back but not even to where he was before February.

Due to his condition they didn't do the surgery laproscopically but by local incision (difference in anesthetics, I gather). He was back home by 1pm. In the post-surgery conference we found out that his surgeon knew he had the hernia back at the cancer point but my dad had put off doing anything about it!

But basically since then he's been on Vicodin. He sleeps a lot, but when he's awake -- and like a cat, his peak cycle is between 10pm and 2am -- he's disturbingly active. He does things that could rip out his hernia mesh. He wants way more pain medication than he should have. He still wants to be kept informed of every goings-on (control freak to the end). We have had varying types of conversations with him. The lucid ones are still frustrating, but many of them are just not lucid.

On Friday he went for a walk -- it was a nice day, but we were concerned about his steadiness and navigation. He looked like a bum (unkempt hair, torn t-shirt, dress pants, scuffed dress shoes, no socks) and sent my niece home when she followed him as my mom suggested. My mom drove around looking for him and found him having a weird conversation with a stranger, and in the car he had a fight with her about trying to find the house of his old employee three blocks down the street.

We took his car keys away from him at that point. At 2am this morning he was over at my apartment knocking on my door asking if I had taken them (so he could lock the house while on a walk). I tried to persuade him to skip the walk but he went anyway.

So today he complained about not being able to find his underwear, and my mom bought him some, and I took it to him to check the size. Well, he decided to pull them on OVER his pants. I told him not to leave them like that; he seemed to start doing this and I left. Then around 10:30 tonight he got up and decided he wanted that walk again. But he was still wearing the underwear over his pants. I was yelling at him not to go out like that and he was giving me an irritated smirk, as if I was nuts. My mother had gone to bed but my niece ran to get her and she persuaded him to take them off. (He told me I should have specified the WHITE underwear).

My mother didn't want him going on the walk at all, especially when he talked about going down by the river. I was torn between thinking he'd probably be OK and the exercise might help him, and backing her up. The end result was that he went out and she tried to follow him using the van, but he slipped between our rental houses and got away from her. Then he came back around the block and was in the house acting like he'd "won" before she got back (having alerted our tenants/friends in the interim that she might need help looking for him).

Anyway, my mother and I basically spent the day trying to get all the medications straightened out and under our control. Tomorrow has to be diving in to the finances. He's been neglecting both of these tasks since February while being controlling about any attempt to get information. I have a feeling that some of his interest rates have been jacked up in this time and other stuff is just falling by the wayside. Obviously we should have acted earlier, but he basically has spent forty-odd years barking my mom off of anything involving money (and with them being guardians of my brother's kids, who are all three somewhat developmentally disabled, the stress levels are incredible), and now here we are. At least I have SOME idea what's going on (a lot of juggling), but I don't know where all the odds and ends are.

MAYBE if he gets off the Vicodin he'll be somewhat capable again, but we can't go back to the way things were, either. This little vent is helping me shake some of it all off, but my mother is unbelievably depressed. She's been to an Alzheimer's caregiver support group already and said that she really identified with the way some of them feel like widows (or widowers) without being widowed, and with this stranger to take care of.