In my previous post

A Long Talk

I had a decent, and enlightening conversation with someone diagnosed with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. That has normally been impossible with those of our residents that suffer from those problems. They almost never seemed to be based in solid reality. Most of the people I have spoken with have large gaps of memory missing and either don’t remember the past or don’t remember the current moment for very long.

Mr. Q is unlike most of the others with his problems that I have personally spoken with. Although Mr. Q has difficulty speaking most of the time when he can speak I can usually hold a fairly decent conversation with him. He does ignore a lot of questions normally, but yesterday that was not the case.

Anyway the boo boo was one he did before. I won’t detail it, but will say when he got up late last night or very early this morning instead of doing his business in the toilet like normal people he did it somewhere else. It wasn’t good and the floor was soaked. That’s the third or fourth time that we caught him doing that.

A few days ago I caught him outside. He picked up an old plastic coffee can that one of the residents had used for an ash tray and tried to pi.. in it. He couldn’t get his pants open so it was not successful. When I happened to glance out the window and see him I missed part of that so I was guessing what he was trying to do. But after I saw that I went outside and hid behind the house and watched him walk around the side of the house and try it again. I yelled out to stop and got to him before he did it completely. I talked to him and tried to get him to understand he needs to go inside and do his business in the bathroom (on the toilet) and not in a can.

So in some respects he is not thinking clearly because there was no reason he had to use a can when there was a toilet available that was empty of any other resident. After he went inside he really didn’t have to go to the bathroom that bad. He could have waited an hour or two or more if he was thinking normally.