So it turns out that Sunday night’s aural hallucinations were just the beginning with my father. He continued to be very confused during the day and by Sunday Night after dinner, he was convinced that we had eaten at a restaurant and that we were still there. He was convinced that I was trying to get him to go to sleep at the restaurant.
It was a battle that took xanax and a long talk on the phone with my sister to get past. The visual hallucinations are back in full flush. He’s pretty convinced that he needs to get back home from wherever he is and very hard to get to go to bed.
It is very disconcerting how these kinds of episodes come and go. The last one only lasted for a couple of days but this episode has gone on now for 5 days. What is also odd is how there had seemed to be some kind of trigger for the previous episodes. Usually a series of social interactions seemed to really set him off balance. But after we started him on the Trazadone, those issues seemed to have been resolved and we had started getting him out again for Sunday brunches or lunch and a walk around the mall.
He has been talking about Mom (gone for 3 1/2 years) quite a bit and even asked me once how she was being treated in Hawaii. Oh my.
There are numerous stories all wound up and coming out in bits and pieces. “We forget to lock the car.” “How are we going to get home?” “We aren’t going to stay here tonight, are we?” “Did I tell you that your sister is in jail?”
I’m switching him from Xanax to Klonopin and hope the transition doesn’t create more problems. But I’m thinking this may be a long term change.
We had dad in to a Neurologist and a Psychiatrist after he had had a particularly severe episode very similar to this were he was convinced that I was his brother. By the time he could get in to see them, the episode had passed. They did find a somewhat suspicious cyst in the back of his brain but no one has been able to give much information other than these are common symptoms of dementia as the disease progresses.
My responses to him really vary from day to day – some days I can ride with it and other days, not so much. On days when the weather is nice, I can get him pretty worn out by taking walks.
Today’s been pretty rainy but so far I think the Klonopin is more stablizing than the xanax. It doesn’t knock him out the same way. And thus, he doesn’t wake up even more anxious than before I gave him the pill.
The test will be how hard it is to get him into bed tonight. . .
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