Dementia Man: Three-month Review (Part 2)

Incontinence

Some things like incontinence are occurring much more frequently. Where before he had no significant problem going pee pee and never (as far as I know) wet his pants and underwear, he has wet his pants quite a few times lately.

He has done poo poo a lot of times recently where initially that almost never happened. Neither of those things are really unusual for real old people, but when you have to spend hours cleaning up the mess it can be a problem.

Sometimes, often we have had to clean up his poop several times a day from the rug, floor, bed and elsewhere, including the closet in his room. There have been times when he has pooped several times in a day and had that many showers too. The pooping I am mentioning have all been other than in the toilet.

Less you think pooping is not a problem when it happens all over the place several times a day – then you have not spent the hours involved regularly just washing his clothes, cleaning the rug, his clothes before they go into the washer, trying to get his clothes off of him and almost as hard getting new clothes on him plus other easy tasks, made difficult due to Mr. Q.

Mr. Q has less problems the past couple of weeks in his pooping problems, but most of that is due to spending sometimes several hours a day (every day) keeping him on the toilet stool long enough to do his bowel movement.

As I was getting ready to publish this last night I decided to wait until the morning. Early in the morning I was awakened and summoned to Mr. Q’s bedroom. There he was sitting on the floor in his poo poo. He had just come from the bathroom where he had done his business (in the toilet). We finally got that problem resolved but it took three hours all told. We had to struggle to give him a bath, cloth him, get him to try to do more in the toilet (he had more to do) and get him to the table to eat. The rest of the morning was almost gone and then we had to try to keep him at the table to eat even a little lunch. That was a problem.

Clothing

One has to be especially observant and fast when dealing with his clothes getting them on/off since he will grab them and won’t let go. It’s only my brute force that can pry them out of his fists and sometimes that is extremely difficult. His resistance can turn a minute job into ten or fifteen minutes of struggling if one is not careful or fast.

It has been so bad with his clothes we had to resort to removing all the clothes from his closet. That caused other problems – he went to the “toilet” several times in his closet. More recently he ripped off the closet door. Then a day after I put it back up he ripped it off again. Before that he had knocked the door down once or twice before. We believe he might have been thinking the closet was a bathroom. Finally he knocked both doors down. I put them back up (no easy task) and the next day he knocked one of them off the track again. I had enough and quit being a nice guy. I fixed the closet doors so it would be difficult to knock them down again, but it is not impossible. The closet is now unusable for the time being. Let’s see how long this fix lasts.

I thought the problem of him knocking the closet doors was just because he was here, but after talking with his guardian I found out he did the same thing at his apartment. Both closet doors were laying on the floor when they went into examine his place.