About a month ago, I wrote a post about another turn that mom had made in this disease. The problem was that mom had been waking up at night completely disoriented, thinking it was day time. Consequently, during the day she slept, thinking it was night. It was after some detective work in my online support groups and a home UTI test that showed up positive that we concluded mom's disruptive routine was the result of a UTI. I wrote my follow up post, stating that the doctor had ordered a UTI test at the lab and in the meantime had prescribed mom some antibiotics because it did sound as if she had a UTI. She started the antibiotics and soon after had gotten back into her regular routine. We were confused, however, when the lab results came back a few days later, negative for a UTI. The doctor figured she must've had some other sort of infection that the antibiotics cleared up, thus getting her back into her routine.
So here we are, a month later, finding ourselves in the same situation, yet again. For the past week mom has been very disoriented with time. She's been up showering at midnight, making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at 4:00 in the morning and playing on her computer at random times of the day and night. She's been keeping my poor dad up at night. The interesting part is that she doesn't think it's night time during the day. She might think it's dinner time when it's breakfast, but I haven't noticed her (or heard about from my dad or other caregivers) getting in her jammies and sleeping during the day. It's almost as if this past week has been one very long, continuous day for her. Except that she will, on occasion, rinse her hair or put on make-up and do bits and pieces of her routine (only at random times of the day/night). I can't make sense of it because her entire routine is thrown off. It's hard to think that it could be another infection (though it's possible), but more likely just the turn we have been fearing-that mom has lost her sense of time.
Nice post!
ReplyDelete