Wandering LOs

[Guest guest]

At 09:02 PM 9/15/2004, you wrote:

>The specific medication I wanted to look up is Ativan.

Just two Ativan turned my mother into an aggressive, hallucinating

basket case. She was agitated over... some tiny thing, so I gave her one,

which was half the recommended dose. The agitation continued so half an

hour later I gave her the second. She was still upset but she was smiling

a lot, which was really creepy. Then she seemed to calm down for about an

hour, but after supper, she went nuts, and continued on all night. It was

horrible.

>Yesterday my Dad escaped. A nurse found him in the parking lot. I am

>SO not happy about this. Apparently 2 nurses came through a

>stairwell door right where my Dad ALWAYS sits in the hall. Their

>arms were full, so they didnt bother to make sure the door locked

>behind them. (there apparently is a 15 second delay). I am trying

>not to make a mountain out of a molehill since I do really like the

>home my Dad is in...but...well...he's my Dad and if his life is

>almost jeopardized by carelessness, it IS a mountain.

I do understand your concern, but I wanted to tell you a story

which might put this into some perspective. My parents' housekeeper, who

is actually more like a second daughter to them, went through some sort of

dementia with her own father for about five years. Along with her husband,

her two nearly-adult teens lived in the household, and one teenage

granddaughter. So two adults and three young people who were of an age to

understand that they had a certain responsibility to grand-dad. He also

spent time at a local day-care place where they had a lot of clients who

were in different stages of senile dementia, and where the people who ran

the place were really on the ball.

Papa was an escape artist. In the four or five years she had him

with her, he must've escaped from them or from the day care place a dozen

times. The last time he was gone overnight, and they found him in the park

with a bag of dougnuts, which was odd because he had no money!

My mother never fails to amaze me at how well she manages to get

around my methods of trying to keep her safe. Frex: She has to wear a gait

belt because it's the only way I can be sure she's relatively safe when she

walks. But she hates it, and has a bad habit of taking it off,

particularly when she's agitated. I put it on, she takes it off, I put it

back on, and we go on like this for hours. (She always has an excuse, too,

and they're quite inventive.) I took to pinning it, figuring she'd never

get the pin out. Wrong! I pinned it to the back of her dress. She got it

off. I turned it around, put the pin INSIDE the back of her dress. She

got it off.

She sleeps in a hospital bed and I put the bars up so she doesn't

wander in the night. She has managed, broken hip and all, to climb over

them! She also regularly gets her legs stuck between them so that I have

to get up and pull the bed apart to get her out.

Unfortunately I think a lot of people tend to mistake dementia for

stupidity. People with dementia are not stupid. In some ways I think

they're smarter than we are because they're so focused. And one moment of

inattention, and they can be halfway to Iowa. Not to minimize what

happened to your dad, but they seem to develop this knack of slipping under

the radar that just boggles me!

Good luck,

dargie