No Time for Nap Time

Tuesday May 20, 2008
Mr. Q was an easy care person most of the morning. He didn’t really have any serious problems. It was shortly after lunch however when he started his almost routine actions of looking at the clock on the stove to know what time it was. Sometimes he does that a dozen or more times within an hour or so. Sometimes he will ask the same question “What time is it?” just a minute or two after he looked at the clock and verbally said what time he saw.

He is always right when he says the time after he just looked at the clock, but it must not be registering what that time means. He seemed to know before, but the last couple of weeks I don’t think he has any idea what a half hour or hour is.

When 2:00 pm came I told him it was nap time. He used to look forward to it and know what it meant, but lately he does not seem to know the meaning of nap time. I had to try to force him to get into bed. It didn’t work. He would not stay in bed. I tried unsuccessfully for about fifteen minutes to get him to go or stay in bed. No such good luck. Not only would he not go to bed he forced his way outside on the patio.

I got him back inside, but could not get him to get in bed. I was totally frustrated after having wasted a half-hour on that so I gave up. About a half hour later he decided to get in bed himself. I was relieved so now I could get to my work that I was behind on.

I got on my computer and forgot about Mr. Q until I looked out the window about a half hour later and saw him meandering around the patio. I guess he really didn’t want a nap. After all the fuss about wanting to go take a nap it was all in vain.

After he got up from “his nap”, which he really didn’t take at all I spent the next couple of hours talking with him. I wanted to see if he remembered some simple things because he seemed kinda “out of it” a lot lately. Mostly when he gets up and when it is time to take a nap.

I asked him how much was 2 + 6 and he got it right. Several other extremely easy addition problems he got correct. He was not able to get any easy subtraction problems right. However I am not sure if he forgot or was frustrated and couldn’t remember. I asked what was 7 – 1? What was 1 – 7? What was 10 – 9? He almost got that one, but not quite. I will try again one day. I think he was frustrated because he could not do most of the operations. I could see it in his face. Some questions (he had a paper with the numbers in front of him) he admitted he didn’t know. Others he said nothing if he did not know the answer.

I tried some harder problems to see if that made a difference. He couldn’t answer any of them. He seemed totally unaware of the process or correct answers. I expected this, but tried anyway. I asked him what was 2 squared. What was the square root of 9, what was 10 squared. Nothing. He couldn’t figure it out. All this time I wrote out the numbers on a sheet of paper and showed him that plus the answers.

I asked some other questions what was the picture I showed him. I had a book with large pictures of different phenomena that he had looked at several times before. Most he did not know. I even showed him a large picture of Albert Einstein in the book and he just could not recognize it. That was a surprise since he was so familiar with Einsteins famous formula E=MC squared.

He didn’t recognize several different pictures of laser beams. He didn’t recognize a traditional picture of an atom. There were some rather common scientific pictures he also did not recognize. He only recognized three or four of about twenty pictures I showed him. My guess would be a person in high school would recognize at least three fourths of them from the context of the pictures even if they were not totally sure. The book “On the Nature of Things – Scientific Photography” may have been too complicated for him – even though it was almost totally all large colorful pictures and very little writing, except for the picture captions.

There were no more problems that I remember that day.