We left the beginning of February for a week to go home (Wisconsin) so my dad could talk to someone about adding onto my house when Mother came out of the nursing home AND I needed to get some more stuff. Remember, I came to Tennessee with enough clothes for about three days as my husband was going to follow me with my suitcase for the funeral that never happened so he never came.

We had been doing Mother’s laundry before we left but let the nursing home do it for that week. When we came back the afghan I had crocheted her was MIA. Everybody else had theirs but hers was missing. We were looking all over the place, asked the staff and finally came up with it in the laundry room. Well, at least I didn’t have to try to find that pattern again and make a new one! That one was pretty big and a LOT of work.

Another time, she lost her glasses. Mother used to put things in the garbage. She was SUPPOSED to stay in her wheelchair and she’d wheel into her room to get at her little bedside table drawer and get herself stuck in there. She’d take stuff from the drawer and put it in bags and put it in the garbage. I asked her once what she was doing and she said she was putting things away. Okay, so I need to remember to check the garbage when I come visit. So we’re looking in the garbage, the dumpster, the drawers, closet, everywhere we can think of. We talked to the staff and FINALLY, one of the CNAs found them on somebody else’s face. Don’t ask, I have no idea! But we were glad to find them.

Something else I noticed, after the strokes, is that she often talks backward, which I found rather amusing. So she’d say something Yodaish and I say, okay, Yoda. I also noticed that she also DOES things backward or upside down. She would put things on top of things. She has some significant left-side neglect from the strokes, meaning she forgets she has a left side. So she won’t see things on the left side. Her eyes are okay, and she actually sees it but doesn’t realize it. It is really weird how that works. Hers is not as bad as some but it is definitely there.

I read of another person an online stroke message board who had a friend who had had a stroke and NOTHING on the left side existed. You could stand right in front of her to the left and you weren’t there until you moved over to the right side. Mother isn’t quite that bad.

Well, right now we are preparing to move them up to Wisconsin so are in the throes of packing a house that they’ve lived in for the past 16 years. I’m pretty much packing the house by myself with Mother coming after me and unpacking sometimes or “helping” me pack and my dad is packing the outside, yard stuff, garage and other outbuildings. A lot of work. So, I will probably not post much for the next week or so as we finish up here and begin to settle in there.