Hamsters are nocturnal. Mice and rats, too, like to party all night. You should just know that before saying yes to getting one for your kid. Or before committing to live with someone with advanced stage dementia. Maybe it’s not all folks with dementia. Maybe it’s just Ma. Imagine, if you will, living with a 95-pound, 94-year-old hamster. One who is half blind, half deaf, and regularly gets into your store of magic mushrooms.
There are mornings I want an award for not smothering my mother with a pillow during the night. A button I can wear, like “I voted” buttons, only this one should say “I didn’t kill my mother last night.”
Those mornings, they usually follow the nights I’ve given her extra medication (in lieu of the aforementioned pillow). Mornings like that, like this morning, I feel like a fraud. On the outside, I may look compassionate, patient and saintly–the Mother Theresa of Caregivers–but inside, I’m sizing up the various pillows. Or maybe I’m more like a duck–calm on the outside, but just below the surface, paddling like hell with a pillow hidden under each wing.
She slept all day yesterday, which theoretically leaves me free to do whatever I want. But we have a daytime aide, so awake or asleep, I have my days free. Yesterday, the aide sat and read for an eight-hour shift while mom slept. Boring, but as paying gigs go, not so bad.1
I know what’s coming. No matter how deep the sleep, she’s up as soon as the aide leaves. She’d slept through lunch, took her 2:00 pm medication (Seroquel, Lexapro and Antihistamine for anxiety, depression, allergies) at 4:00 pm during a five-minute window of awakfiltudeness.2 She took I gave her her evening medication an hour later; I was able to get some dinner into her and then she fell asleep on my shoulder.3 Here is the I’m No Angel part.
Maybe I coulda/shoulda skipped giving her the evening meds. But, sleep deprivation is real.
Sleep deprivation can lead to depression or anxiety, or make you feel frustrated and cranky. I’m already taking my own antidepressant cocktail that I need when I was getting eight hours a night. Even on eight hours I’m cranky with a side of sarcasm. Cranky with asipirations of curmudgeonhood. Screaming Get Off My Lawn in my head at everyone, all the time. Cranky would be my communion name, if I was Catholic. It’s my stripper name, my hip hop name. Use cranky as a prompt in an AI generator, there I am ⬇️.
Insufficient sleep weakens your immune system and can increase your risk of heart problems, diabetes, obesity, heart attack, and stroke as well as slow down reaction times, and contributing to poor balance and coordination. I fall down pretty regularly on a good day and I’ve dealt with weight problems my whole life. I’m no Dead Man Walking but I’ve spent a lot of years as Fat Girl Falling™. At 67, with ostepenia, osteonecrosis and having already broken my left wrist in seven places and my right, twice, in three places, I’m trying to reduce the risk factors in my life. It would be nice to get an actual nights sleep now and again.
Mom fell asleep leaning against me around 7:00 pm. I’d felt lucky I’d gotten almost five hours sleep the night before, but FitBit says I’m only sleeping in two to three hour chunks. I worried she’d be up all night.
Escape mode showed up at 11:00 pm.4 Sometimes, I sit with her. This time I went right for the drugs. Lorazepam in liquid form works quickly. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work all night.
There was an hour or two of quiet, followed by talking, fidgeting and occasional escape mode stealth maneuvers on and off until 4:30 am when she finally fell asleep–sitting on the bedside commode. I had to lift her off and back into bed, which woke her up again.
Mornings like this, she always wins. I know when I’m beaten. I gave up.
I could drug her again, but then she’d sleep all day and be up tonight, again. I took a moment to think fondly of the 70s and 80s, when prescription drugs were easy to get, when housewives and hipsters both were using a pill/powder to wake up, another to bring you down. So easy.
I stayed at her bedside, listening to her chatter, pulling her back into bed, chattering back at her. Her aide showed up at 9:00 am, just as she drifted off into a sound asleep again.
I want a trophy for my imaginary trophy shelf. I want a Good Citizenship badge for my Girl Scout sash. I want an award I can frame and hang on the wall. Not for being a good daughter–for not picking up a pillow. I want you to understand, I did not put a pillow over my mother’s face last night and some days, that’s as good as it gets. Some days, that’s just got to be enough.
.
Today is a repeat of yesterday, awake and escapey when it’s just me. Deeply asleep when the aide is here.
You have to jump on these opportunities, these little windows, when you can. Stay in the moment. Ommmm.
Our new normal, falling asleep tucked into my arm. Note that “new normal” means something has happened more than once, but does not guarantee it will continue.
Escape mode includes gathering up all the blankets and sheets, scooting to the end of the bed, trying to remove the guard rails and yelling, Hello!! Hello!! It won’t open!! She doesn’t know where she wants to go, just that she has to go.
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