Adventures with my own brain

Sometimes the adventures of my day are more about my brain than about my mum’s.

Today was a case in point.

As usual, I put the breakfast materials out last night to help my mum make her own toast and cup of tea for breakfast this morning. If I don’t put most of the ingredients out on the bench, she will most likely eat chocolate biscuits. Actually, even if I do put the ingredients out, she is quite likely to snack on a chocolate biscuit or two while making her toast. Lately, if I don’t put the teabags and sugar lumps in a prominent position, she may end up overlooking the two sugar bowls and adding a scoop of ginger marmalade to her tea, or possibly crumbling part of a chocolate biscuit into it. Unsurprisingly, she doesn’t seem to enjoy those concoctions as much.

I can imagine readers thinking, Why aren’t you scurrying into the house each morning to make your mum’s breakfast? Two reasons. Firstly, I tend to be less calm, serene, and tactful first thing in the morning. I make more mistakes in the way I speak to and take on tasks around my mum before I have fully woken up myself. And secondly, at this stage she is still able to make her own cups of tea and pieces of toast. There are some hazards to be sure, but my mum wants to be independent and competent, in control of her own life, and when I do everything for her, I see her becoming annoyed and wishing I was somewhere else.

No doubt soon enough the time will come when the hazards outweigh the benefits, but for now I keep an eye on the breakfast preparations via the security camera, and breeze in to help when I can see there’s a problem. Like the day I saw her add salt to her tea followed by a crumbled cube of chocolate. At that point I thought it was time to make her a fresh cup under the pretext of wanting a cup of coffee myself.

This morning breakfast seem to go pretty smoothly, and then my mum went outside and started sweeping autumn leaves from the pebblecrete paving. Personally I think it’s a waste of time cleaning up autumn leaves day after day, but my mum likes things to be tidy, it’s good exercise, and I was glad she could be out in the fresh air after several weeks of a nasty cold and lots of gloomy damp weather.

I can’t see my mum everywhere in the garden. I set the security cameras up to cover the exits after she disappeared for four hours on a rather warm afternoon. That’s a story for another day!

But I am starting to think it would be useful to be able to keep an eye on her movements a little more. For example, I might be able to find the remote control that went missing this evening while I was out at my Bible study group. Checking the recordings I can see she had it in her hand at 8:28. At 8:30 she stood up and walked into a part of the house that I can’t see on camera. Five minutes later she walked back into the TV area looking a little chilly, which suggests she had been in a less well-heated part of the house - but that doesn’t narrow it down much. She sat down, and promptly started checking around her chair; she stood up and searched more widely. She turned an extra light on, and kept looking, then apparently gave up and sat down again. So - yay! I know that the remote control went missing between 8.28 and 8.30. But I have no idea where it went. I have looked in all the usual hiding places, based on the places she’s likely to have gone for two minutes at that time of evening, but no joy.

But that’s not all! One of the possible slightly chilly places my mum might have wandered, remote control in hand, is the laundry. I went in without turning the light on - there’s only one switch and it’s awkwardly positioned near the external door - and saw a dark slender shape lying in the cat’s litter box. Strictly speaking it’s not a box, it’s a Flexi tub with a large hole cut in the side for the cat to get in and out. My own design, and I’m quite pleased with it.

But you’re probably thinking, dark slender shapes in cat litter boxes are not usually missing remote controls. True, but this was much larger than the usual dark slender shape.

Still, I didn’t want to touch it without further investigation. Dear reader, I refer you to the photo accompanying this post.

Now how did THIS get into the cat litter?

Yep. It was a dead rat.

The question is, how did it get there? I have spotted a rat boldly scuttling along the trellis at the back of the garden in broad daylight. My mum’s big stripey grey outdoor cat, Scamp, disturbed my early hours recently to proudly show me a large mouse or very small rat, which he proceeded to decapitate and eat on the mat outside my little studio bedroom, leaving the stomach for me to admire first thing the next morning. My more slender ginger girl Serafina has been devotedly surveying the trellis for some weeks now. Either of them may be guilty of catching and slaughtering the rat.

But here’s the thing: Serafina and Scamp almost never go into the house. My mum’s venerable, rotund and arthritic tortoiseshell girl, Sheba, almost never goes outside, and certainly not for long enough to catch anything. And no self-respecting cat, having caught a good sized rat, would deposit such a juicy feast in a litter tray.

I am forced to conclude that my mum found the dead rat somewhere outside … unless she found it inside the house … but where? I hear them in the roof, but I’ve never seen a rat or mouse inside my mum’s house. And how did it get dead? And of course my mum can’t remember a thing about it, so I will probably never know. But having found the rat, my mum must have decided to tidy it into the cat litter tray. Usually I can detect some kind of logic behind my mum’s unusual actions, but this time I confess I am stumped.

What does any of this have to do with the adventures with my own brain? I am so glad you asked. Nothing whatever. The adventures with my brain started later. We were getting short of food, and my mum hadn’t been on a shopping trip for awhile, so I suggested we buy sandwich at a local cafe, find somewhere nice to eat it in the sunshine, and then a do fairly short shop at the supermarket.

The picnic went nicely, And when we got to the shopping centre, I was able to get my mum in to the hairdresser to have her hair washed and dried.

My mum doesn’t shower without reminders – and usually many protests – these days, and in four months I can only think of once when she has come out of the shower with wet hair. So my strategy is to take her to the hairdresser every week or so for a shampoo and blow dry. She always protests on the way in, but the women are lovely to her, and it’s social interaction as well as physical contact for her, which I am convinced are life-giving.

And I am so grateful to the women at Just Cuts, who are so compassionate and understanding; when my mum went missing they spotted my post on the local community Facebook page, and next time I took her in they kindly offered that I can leave her in their care when she’s in for her shampoos, freeing me up for a few extra minutes to do some errands on my own.

On the way home, I stopped at the pharmacy closest to my mum‘s place. They are pretty terrific too in my opinion. I needed to fill a prescription for my mum, and also for my ADHD meds plus a few supplements. The bad news? In the current climate Extended release stimulant medication is in very short supply worldwide.

ADHD involves brain chemicals that stimulate brain activity being in short supply. How do you treat ADHD? By taking a stimulant medication that helps the brain to function more like a non-ADHD brain. The stimulants that have been found to be most effective wear off after approximately four hours. If you want to continue to have a functional brain during your waking hours, that means that you need to take stimulant medication three or four times across the day.

I love the irony: ADHD is characterised by poor Working Memory – that is, poor ability to hold information in mind temporarily and then retrieve that information at the specific time it’s needed. It is also characterised by poor awareness of the passage of time, and of how much time different things take. Finally, it is characterised by poor organisation, resulting in frequently losing important items that are needed to carry out daily tasks, and frequently failing to have crucial items things in the right place at the right time. And then the treatment for ADHD is medication that you have to plan to have with you, multiple times a day, at the right time. What could possibly go wrong?

But some very clever person in America invented a tiny pump in the shape of a (food-grade) capsule that you can swallow. The tiny pump allows the stimulant to be released gradually across 12 hours, 12 hours of improved brain function from just one dose. Now that was a very useful invention - especially when you add that between 5% and 10% of the population world-wide has significantly impaired function due to ADHD. (I am not providing a reference because you can look that one up for yourself – there’s heaps of research, and I can’t be bothered being more precise right now. Let’s just say ADHD is about as common as left-handedness and significantly more common than green eyes).

According to the pharmacist, the worldwide shortage of this medication has been deliberately manufactured. The patent for the amazingly clever little capsule-shaped pump belongs to the US. The US has decided to restrict the number of pumps that can be produced in other countries (while also charging American customers very high prices). The hope is that other countries will be coerced into paying more to the US in order to meet demand. So people like me around the world are struggling with impaired function because though the short acting tablets are readily available, consistently taking them every four hours is almost impossible. Thank you, United States of Selfishness and Greed.

Right, so we’ve established that it’s America’s fault that my brain isn’t working properly. Except, unfortunately I can’t claim that today, because today I actually did have the extended release medication in my system!

The world shortage of extended release ADHD medication meant that my quick stop at the pharmacist took half an hour or more, but finally my mum and I arrived home, and had some dinner; and my mum took her medication without very much resistance. I went to my Bible study on the other side of town, and I did remember to check in briefly on the security cameras to make sure my mum was okay. I thought she would head for bed pretty soon, because she was already commenting that she was sleepy before I left.

Just as I was leaving the Bible study venue to come home, I had a tense interaction with another member of the group, which made me feel quite churned up; and I was really looking forward to a bit of my own company to think things through. But when I got home, my mum was not yet in bed; in fact that was when the whole incident of the missing remote control and lookalike rat happened.

Now we’re coming to the topic of this post at last. You see yesterday, being the first sunny day in quite while, my mum wandered out into the garden mid-morning, before I had emerged from my little studio bedroom in the back garden. On the security camera I could see that she was looking troubled, so I stumbled out of bed, taking my ADHD meds (which naturally would take a few minutes to kick in), and closing the sliding door behind me so that my cat couldn’t escape - I had some concern that this might be one of those days when the garden gates get left open.

The gates were fine as it turned out, but while I was trying to reassure my mum that all was well, my cat managed to lock the sliding door, leaving me on the outside in my pyjamas, while my purse, keys and phone were locked in the studio with her.

We have one of the best next-door neighbours you could possibly ask for. I trotted in my pyjamas through the gate in our back fences to her front door, and stood waiting for a few minutes while her fierce sounding (but actually super-nervous) dog notified her of my arrival. She answered the door in her nighty - it’s so nice not to have to worry about a little thing like wearing pyjamas at 11am! Before I had finished explaining what had happened, she had pulled up the local locksmith’s number on her phone and passed it to me. Ten minutes later the locksmith was here, and broke into the studio with alarming speed and ease; which made the $130 callout fee even more painful. However, I was grateful that I could get on with the morning.

And I said to myself, I must put a spare key to the studio in a secure location in case something like this happens again.

But it didn’t seem to require an instant visit to the hardware shop for a key safe and drill. So this evening when I finally made it to the studio for my quiet reflection on the troubling conversation I had had, there was still no spare key safely accessible outside the studio. Which was a great shame, because after I had poured my thoughts out on my laptop for a couple of hours, I decided some physical activity was needed to shake off my grumpy thoughts. I chose the autumn leaves immediately outside my little studio, which my mum had left untouched. But I didn’t want my cat to get out and keep me up hunting for her all over the garden in the night, so I closed the sliding door behind me … leaving my cat, phone, key and all the spare keys inside.

At least I wasn’t in my pyjamas this time; but by now it was quite late, I could see that my neighbour’s light was out, and I hate to think what the callout fee is for a locksmith at that time of night. I could get into my mum‘s house and camp on a couch or a spare bed for the night. But I really didn’t want to be separated from my cat and my phone and all the other comforts of my own space for a whole night.

As it happens, I remembered that my window has been installed upside down so it doesn’t latch properly. I’ll be aiming to fix that tomorrow, at the same time as I drive to Bunnings and buy a key safe and a drill. After using my mum‘s broom to sweep four months accumulation of cobwebs - along with their inhabitants - from the window, I remembered a nifty weeding tool I had stored in the outside toilet, that I could slide in beside the wire screen, and loosen it enough to get a grip on it and pull it off the window. Then it was an easy matter to jiggle the reluctant window open – not sure I opened it even back in December the last time I did the cobwebs – grab the cat as she attempted to flee into the night, and restore her to the enclosed part of the garden, before finally heaving myself in through the window. Shame I hadn’t thought of that insecure window yesterday, and saved myself $130.

Through the looking glass

Dementia leaves a person not knowing what is real

Today things are a bit weird. I woke late, and heard the gentle multiple pings of the security cameras, announcing that my mum was on the move. The most recent alert was from what I call the wisteria garden - an unusual place for her to be at that time of day. But today is the first really sunny day for a week or so, and before that both of us were quite unwell with a cold. So we haven’t had much time outside, and it didn’t surprise me that she’d want to be in the garden.

Except that she was standing still, peering fixedly at nothing particular. So I sat up, took the most essential of my medication for the day - the stuff that helps my brain work better! - scrambled into a pair of shoes, squeezed through the sliding door (closing it carefully so my cat didn’t escape), and greeted my mom cheerfully. Hello – what’s happening? Oh, I have to go and see my mother and grandmother. When are you going to do that? Today, I’ve been told I have to go today.

Here is where I really struggle. My mum doesn’t sound happy about having been told that she has to go and see her mother and grandmother. On the other hand, all the advice I’ve read or been given is that I should not contradict her. I know that she has not been told any such thing. Her mother died giving birth to her more than 90 years ago. Her grandmother died most likely of heart condition before my mother was married, and she was married at 21 years of age. No one has been near her who would’ve said any such foolish thing. So do I go along with the upsetting fiction that someone has told her she needs to visit these relatives? Or do I explain that these relatives have not been alive for some seventy plus years?

I like to think that I have some skill as an actor. Some of the most joyous experiences of my life have been when I’ve had the opportunity to be someone else in a dramatic production. Now and again I’ve been a little too convincing in a role-play, so someone has assumed that the character I’ve pretended to be is really me, and they’ve taken offence. But when it comes to real life, I’m not a very convincing liar. Over the years, my lack of political prowess – or is it tact? – has got me into a LOT of trouble.

So it isn’t a big surprise that my mum is unconvinced when I try to pretend with her. When I’ve gone along with her untrue convictions in the past, there have been two negative consequences: she has sensed that she couldn’t trust what I was saying, and therefore distrusted me; and because so many of her fictions are negative, she has spiralled into greater anxiety, convinced that people are angry with her for not caring for her absent children (one died in 2011, the remaining two are adult, one is standing right in front of her, and she did not neglect any of us), her husband has left her because he’s angry with her (my father, who adored her but died of a heart attack in 1999), and the local council are insisting she leave her home (she owns her home, with no debt, and the council doesn’t have the right to do any such thing anyway).

So how do I reassure this fragile confused lady that she is loved, she has lived well, she has kept her promises, she has no enemies, and she doesn’t have to go anywhere today that she doesn’t want to?

Blog Post Title Two

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.

Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.

Blog Post Title Three

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.

Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.

Blog Post Title Four

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.

Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.