The purpose of this blog is to document some of the more unusual behavior that I have been seeing in Mom. This will hopefully help physicians or family members see what exactly is going on and the frequency that it’s happening rather than rely on “a few weeks ago she did this or that.”
There will be days that I do not observe something and that is mainly due to the fact that I work nights and sleep days, so I may not be awake or home to see something.
Most of my observations will likely just be quick notes with just the highlights of a conversation or actions. I’m usually writing right as it’s happening or shortly after and want to make sure that important parts are as accurate as possible.
One of the things that made me realize the problem was much worse than I imagined was when I was at work on November 25 and at about 3:00 AM I started getting notifications from my security camera on my phone and opened them to see this:
One of the officers called me and from the conversation, it seems that Mom had woken confused and scared. She had been locking the doors upstairs because of her fear of “critters” getting her. In her confusion, she had evidently forgotten how to unlock the doors and panicked and called 9-1-1 either from the upstairs phone or after she managed to get the doors unlocked (the knob to the master bedroom was loose when I got home, so she must have really been twisting it trying to get it open). She told the officer that she had been locked upstairs all day. She had actually been downstairs all day and was downstairs when I left for work at around 6:20 PM on the 24th. Needless to say, I changed all the doorknobs inside the house to closet/hall doorknobs without locks later that day so that this wouldn’t happen again.
I had told a co-worker / friend about this and she suggested I start keeping a record of this stuff so that a doctor can see what’s going on, so I originally started putting it on wordpad, but decided to do this instead so that others can follow it if they’d like. So follow along on this painful journey with me if you’d like and may you or your loved ones never have to go through this.