Chapter 359 - Half a Pill for Relief

Each night in the past week she has half a sleeping pill. Some nights I forget to give it to her; she remembers and asks for it. Quite a change from last week end when she was against such an "aid", fearful of being tired and under the weather during daylight hours. She has been sleeping through till at least 0600, sometimes i wake her later. There have been no leakages from her overnight nickers; there have been no stressful early dark hours needs to sit on the commode; I am beginning to feel I have largely recovered from my dose of the wog plus lack of sleep. Of course she wakes sometime between 0200 and 0300 to take meds and I usually get up once a night as well, although we don't seem to wake each other; perhaps we just pretend to be asleep. I must thank the chemist for allowing me to have the packet of Doxylamine Succinate. I assume she will eventually become desensitised to this small dose, perhaps we will both recover from this period of sleep deprivation and she will no longer require sleeping pills.

We have also devised a less stressful routine of attaching the overnight nickers; she lays on the bed, I roll her side-side to get the wrappings of the pants beneath her hips and around her waist. Much less stress than having her stand, stooped, while I positioned the back of the pants, threaded them between her legs then have her get back into bed; the whole being twisted as she lay down again. She is unable to fit them herself.

The above causes me to ask why such peripheral issues to the PD symptoms have to be learned by personal trial and error; although I'm sure somewhere in the murky past there must have been a medical person that suggested sleeping pills. The old Peter Ustinoff look-alike neuro once had her on Kalma (sp?) although I am unsure of the reason, perhaps stress relief. Some patients wish to eliminate taking any sort of pill. All of us tend to resist listening to advice given as  soft suggestions. Over the past year or so, numbers of people comment or ask about our sleep patterns, hours of sleep, quality of sleep. Thanks for asking but someone needs to initiate action and it's not the patient who is in the midst of a slowly deepening bog. Shit, I feel tired thinking about this. The only measurement I have for myself is my performance with Lumosity and Active memory - both are hard work to maintain my scores.

The physio from Wild Dog continues visiting on Wednesdays and Fridays. That is so much appreciated. And the Personal Care ladies from Wild Dog make such a difference to the start of each day. She has long since not complained about me not allowing her to shower before they arrive, maybe plus/minus 10 minutes around 8am. She is now used to an outsider showering and dressing her, has a friendly chat (I hope she does not repeat her stories too much) while I attend to breakfast matters and don't become grumpy and annoyed. Yet when TACP first organised the service we both thought it an unnecessary expense and luxury.

At Hot Air City on Thursday for a routine visit to the neuro who was not bothered that she was taking sleeping pills. We then called at the Independent Living Centre where we investigated wheel chairs suitable for her and our lifestyle (if that's what it can be called).

Our friends from Steel City visited on Friday for an all day BBQ. Although she must have felt restricted at times throughout the day and evening she did not complain until sometime after 8:30pm she said she needed to go to bed. As for me, such a day completely blanks out our normal routine, and although tiring, I feel mentally refreshed. After showing my friend my latest "toy", a Surface Pro 3, she had decided a tablet of that size and weight will be of use to her away from her "fixed" laptop with its couple of screens attached. So such may be a suitable birthday present and a new wheel chair just a necessity of life. I just went to check on her at 11am; she had missed her 10am meds playing with the Surface Pro and misreading the clock on the wall! Such is life.