Yesterday I cried long and hard. I shouldn`t be able to cry. I shouldn`t have feelings. I take medication for that shit.
I can accept that my mom is irritable sometimes. I can accept that she has forgotten how her family members are connected to her or that she thinks of me as `the girl who looks after her` (very rarely, I might add). I can accept that she asks the same questions, tells the same brief stories and has lost 4 walking canes in two months.
I cannot, however, handle the terror in her eyes when she looks over at me, wondering where she is and how she got there as twilight falls and we`re still two and a half hours from a place she doesn`t even think is her home.
During that long drive, I tried to be calming. I tried to put the dots close together so she could come to the decision that she does live in a basement apartment near her favourite grocery store with all of her usual furniture and the same neighbours across the hall. I tried to convince her that no one had moved her things from one apartment to another while we had been on a 4-day road trip (clearly the worst mistake I`ve ever made). I even had to reconstruct (deconstruct?) every metaverse I could remember to try to explain why there was not currently another apartment with all the same dimensions and simulations in another part of the Township as per her adamant assertions.
I tried to laugh some things away and dismiss her paranoia.
When we arrived at the apartment, I thought she would have visual proof that everything was as it should be. I was very wrong. Her anxiety tripled as she struggled to understand how this could be. I watched her brain run through every possible combination of events that could put her in this alien situation.
A week before this meltdown, she called my sister in dismay because her bathtub was overflowing. The neighbour said she had been unable to shower for four days and had not been sleeping. She told me she had been stuck in the bathroom during that time because there were documents shoved down the drain. This story turned into one about tiles that turned black and solidified when she poured liquid on them in the bathtub. Then the police came (unlike the story of Germans who were coming the week before to take her to jail for COVID violations), and "sorted everything out".
There is no evidence of "tiles" in her apartment. No evidence of a week-long, loo battle. She cannot explain why she would do this with said tiles or what kind of liquid caused them to expand and turn black. But, it sounds like she lives in a hell of her own making. This is terrifying.
In spite of my empathy, by the fourth hour in the emergency department (since I could not leave her in a strange place, nor could I - as a complete stranger - take her back to my home), I was ready to walk out and let her be someone else's problem. She's stubborn as a mule at the best of times and refuses to take any medication because she's no "weakling." Any suggestion of care by another person is met with defiance and accusations of "railroading".
I am just like her.
According to the doctor, she was healthy as a horse (or mule, if the shoe fits) and she should see her family doctor for something to help with her memory. It took a dissociative crisis to convince her to go the hospital with me. It will take a half dozen cops on a wellness check to get her to visit a family doctor and, furthermore, take prescription medication. The situation feels hopeless.
I just wanted to get this out in words to document my experience. I feel helpless, hopeless, frustrated, ashamed and angry and I know many, many people who have gone through or currently live in this nightmare. To those of you out there, I see you.
