V is for Valerie

V is for Valerie?  Why is it for Valerie?  Valerie is my mom's first name.  I've written about some of the troubles that I'm having at home.  This is about what is happening with my mom.

First of all, she says she has always had low pressure.  I don't know if this was true when she was a little kid, but I know that she even had low blood pressure before Briana was born, and I think before I was born.  It's not exactly a completely new thing, so she isn't lying about that.

Friday and Saturday night were spent in the Emergency Room at Memorial Hospital.  Briana convinced her to go to get a thorough check-up and it is a good thing that she went.  It was found that she has a massive bladder infection which they said could easily contribute to her having a low blood pressure and being sick.

I keep trying to enforce the importance of being clean to her, but she doesn't tend to always clean herself like she need to clean herself. Then, even though I tell her, she has a fit and goes into her mode of yelling, "Bridget, I'm an adult!  I know what I'm doing!"

That, unfortunately, has become a common refrain in this household.

The problem is that most of the time, she doesn't know what she is doing.

Briana and I were looking and we found articles about how soccer players that repeatedly head soccer balls have brain injuries, but they are not detected by CT scans or MRIs because the brain heals enough so that no medical technology finds these brain injuries.  However, they do exist.

With how many times my mom has fallen, from being dizzy lately, and earlier, she would get drunk and fall, she'd hit her head, even though we'd try to teach her how to fall and not hit her head.  She wouldn't take the advice and lean to the back or to the side to hit her butt.  She wouldn't use her arms or her legs to fall on them as it is not as good as falling on your butt, but it's better to have a broken arm or a broken leg than to hit your head.

She goes into these "episodes," where she really doesn't know what she is doing.  She may remember a tiny bit, but she doesn't know overall what she is doing.

The most recent occurrence of this is when she went out to get food from Wok D'Lite.  First of all, she bought three dinners and three drinks.  One dinner is huge enough for all three of us.  So, all she needed to do was buy one dinner and three drinks.

However, I asked her how much it was and she told me it was around $40.  I got to see what she spent, and thankfully, it was just a bit under $20.

She tends to buy things when she is in these "episodes."  She goes out to buy food.  She knows she needs a driver's license. That stays with her, so I have her license and if it gets so bad in these episodes, we'll just have to tell her that she doesn't have one.

She's dangerous when she's "normal" as it is when it comes to driving. She doesn't tend to look at the road.  She looks at the steering wheel.  Awhile ago, she tilted the steering wheel down and told me she did this like it was going to help me.  I had to go fix it again because what she really did was make it impossible to see the speedometer.

She was in one the other day, too, when she yelled to me that she unplugged the house phone in the bedroom. I asked her why and she said it was because she wanted it to be quiet.  I asked her why she wanted that.  She insisted that the phone had been ringing all day.  It had rung once and that was hours earlier.  It hadn't rung since then that day.

She also doesn't know where to find the time when she's in the living room.  The time is always right on the cable box.

Quite awhile ago, but something Briana and I remember clearly, is how she tried to talk to Niblet (that's her chihuahua) about SSI. We know it was about some type of benefits.  Of course, when she talks, it usually doesn't make sense.  It made no sense, but she insisted that Niblet understood what she was saying and that we shouldn't be interrupting because he needed to understand what she was saying.

Niblet sat on the floor next to the chair where she was sitting and looking up at her, all confused.  He looked at me and at Briana, too.   The poor dog was so confused.

She's also called either Niblet or Woofles "Cinder."  Cinder was the dog that she had when we were young. She has not been around since I've been in 8th grade.

It's really sad to watch her go down like this because she is only 52 and I see plenty of people who are much older that are much more fit than she is.

I wish that we had the money so we could afford to put her in a nursing home, but those cost about $5,000 per month.  Then, we'd need to pay all the bills, so we'd probably need another $2,000 per month.  I don't know of jobs that pay $7,000 per month or have a salary of $154,000 per year.   Okay, maybe coaching some type of sport, but I don't play sports or know anything about coaching them!

It's no wonder those coaches have a good life and great lifestyles!  My Daddy was a chemistry professor and they didn't value him more than the coaches, no matter how much extra time he stayed at McNeese to help and to work and keep things done.

It was upsetting enough for him when they took the computer lab away so his students could no longer use them to do chemistry work, then they would stuff extra people in his classes, and it was getting worse and worse.  Sadly, he passed away, but I think he would have been under so much stress to know that they had cut the budget at McNeese for the Arts and Sciences.

So, yeah, Valerie, even if she says things are "fine," really isn't doing well.  It's difficult to explain.

If you've ever read Sybil, you've read about what they used to call Multiple Personality Disorder.  It is somewhat like this, but it's like this other "Valerie" isn't really there at all.  She'll snap back to reality and maybe remember parts of what she did (but sometimes she doesn't know what she did at all), and the "Valerie" that did exist is kind of like another personality, but you can't truly access it again.  It's not like when she goes into an episode that she'll remember what she did, either.

Perhaps you can link it to sleepwalking, but it's not that, either.  She's awake, just not in the right state of consciousness or something like that.

If we don't know how to explain it and the doctors don't know how to explain it, we can't really explain it to other people.  She's just not herself at all any longer.  She doesn't even understand the simplest of jokes and puzzles when she is in one of these "episodes."

It also seems that we never truly know how long one will last.  Sometimes she seems to be in one for weeks.  Other times, it seems to happen for just a few hours per night.

We won't even get into the Depends and the accidents and the constant falling.  Now you know a bit more about what is happening with my mom, Valerie.