No illness is fun, but at times, funny things can happen. My aunt had Alzheimer’s and my uncle had another form of ‘sometimes’ dementia. Most of the time, my uncle was totally mentally together, but the odd day, he was lost. Reading the following true story will no doubt leave you slightly off center. Just imagine if you had to experience it in real life like I had done. I honestly think I am still slightly unbalanced from the experience.
About fifteen years ago, I suffered a horrendously painful back injury. It took a long time before I was barely able to walk. My injury ended up costing me my job.
Like many people who work, I longed for my holidays so I could get things done that I didn’t have time to get to while working at my job. There were things like cobwebs in the corners of my ceilings, mending, painting and washing windows, just to name a few of the tasks that I had been saving up to fill in my time during holidays. Oh, yes, I longed for the time to do things and with my injury, I had nothing but time on my hands. The unfortunate thing was that I no longer had the physical ability to do the things that I finally had time to do.
While I was in the worst time of my injury, all I could do was lie on my back and stare at the ceiling. The offending cobwebs in particular, took on a life of their own. At first, there seemed to be only small webs in the corners, but as the weeks passed by with me flat out on my back, the webs grew in numbers. They were everywhere. As the web ropes grew larger, they attracted more and more dust. Some of the ropey webs broke and hung down in a straight line. I tried to grab one, but it hung just out of my reach to torment me as it swung back and forth from the breeze of an open window. It fluttered in slow motion and dropped visible particles of dust on me.
When I could no longer bear the pain in my back, I called my doctor and she said she could give me a cortisone injection right into the site of the pain. I begged her to give me the injection. I had aspirations of finally being pain free; if only for a few months.
The pain from the injection was intolerable. Tears squirted out at will as I stood leaning over the examining table. While doing the deed, the doctor explained some of the nasty side effects from cortisone injections such as rapid heartbeats, profuse sweating, and weird dreams, just to name a few.
The mere mention of weird dreams sounded delightful to me because it suggested that sleep was now a possibility. In that past week, I had only had less than two hours of uninterrupted sleep. More than likely the lack of sleep greatly contributed to my mental condition at that time.
The injection was done on a Wednesday after a totally sleepless night the night before. Weird dreams or not, I was looking forward to being able to sleep pain free for a change.
I arrived home to hear the phone ringing. My Uncle had called to invite my husband and me to his country cottage for the long weekend. It was May, and it was the first weekend that he and my aunt were going to open the cottage for the season. I readily accepted. At least I could relax now that I had the injection and I wouldn’t have to lie on my back and stare at the cobwebs on my own ceiling. I was sure that another focus was going to be a welcome change for me… and sleep would be great in the quiet countryside.
It was determined that we would go with my aunt and uncle in their car. I felt safer that way, just in case my uncle was having an ‘off’ day, we wouldn’t have to worry about him driving and getting lost. While I couldn’t drive, my husband could share the driving with my uncle. We were supposed to be there for five days. When my husband arrived home from work, we packed up our bags and our Samoyede dog and waited for my uncle to arrive.
For some reason, I was nominated to ride in the front seat with my uncle. As soon as I got into the car, I noticed that the gas gauge was reading empty. I pointed this out to my uncle and mentioned that there was a gas station about a minute’s drive up the road. He acknowledged my concern and said that he had plenty of gas to make it to his cottage. I knew differently. The gauge was reading empty and we had a good two hour’s ride ahead of us. As he blew by the gas station and headed for the highway, I had no doubt in my mind that we were going to be in trouble within a few minutes. With my aunt and uncle both frail individuals in their eighties and me physically out of commission, the only one left to push the car would have been my husband. As soon as that thought crossed my mind, my uncle suddenly let out an expletive and pulled over to the side of the road. My heart pounded in fear because I didn’t know what had just freaked him out.
I asked my uncle what was wrong and he said he just realized he had no gas. He swore at us because he said someone should have told him he was out of gas. I shook my head and asked my husband to drive to the nearest gas station. So, right there on the side of the highway, we all got out of the car and everyone changed places.
Riding on fumes and a few prayers, we made it to a gas station and filled up the tank. I was reluctant to let my uncle drive us the rest of the way because he seemed to be wandering in and out of sanity. At that point, my uncle refused to allow my husband to drive. He said he could manage it by himself. I prayed the rest of the way along the highway.
At some point, in my state of fear and pain, I tuned into the chatter between my aunt and uncle in the front seats.
“Where are the house keys?” he asked my aunt.
“What house keys?” she replied.
“The ones I gave you as we were leaving the house in town,” he said.
“Did you give me keys when we were leaving? Why do we need them if we are going to the cottage?”
“That’s what I told you. How are we going to get in, if we don’t have the keys for the cottage?” my uncle stated in exasperation.”For God’s sake Mary, look in your purse.”
My aunt readily obeyed and lifted her jumbo purse from the floor and opened it on her lap without saying another word. She pulled out all sorts of paraphernalia and loaded it up on her lap and on the seat beside her. I kind of lost interest in what she was doing as she rummaged through all the stuff she pulled out. I did see her open the glove compartment and put something inside then slam it shut. I didn’t see what it was though. Soon after that, my aunt started reading some scraps of paper she had found in her purse.
Suddenly, my uncle shattered the long silence by asking my aunt where the keys were.
“What keys are you talking about, Len?” my aunt asked.
My husband and I looked at each other and smiled. The conversation was getting nuttier and nuttier.
“Mary,” he said patiently, “before we left home, I gave you a bunch of keys to put in your purse so we would know where the keys to the cottage are when we get there. Do you have any keys in your purse now?”
“Let me check, Len,” my aunt replied and began again to empty the contents of her purse onto her lap. “Aha!” she exclaimed, “I have been looking for that rosary for a long time and now I found it. See, Len.”
“Never mind the rosary, Mary. That’s not going to help us get into the house. Where are the keys?”
“What keys, Len?” my aunt asked in all seriousness, obviously forgetting why she had been looking in her purse in the first place.
“The Kennedy’s have a spare set of keys. I’ll have to turn around and go back to their house to get their keys.”
“Why do you want the Kennedy’s keys, Len? Are we going to stay there tonight?”
“No, Mary. The Kennedy’s have our keys,” my uncle said.
“Oh, I see. Why don’t we just go to our cottage and call them and invite them over for the evening and they can bring the keys with them.”
My uncle unceremoniously turned the car around and headed towards where Kennedy’s lived.
“Mary, don’t you remember, we don’t have a phone at the cottage. Even if we did, we cannot get in without the keys.”
“Yes, we can, Len. All we have to do is pick up our spare keys from the Kennedy’s,” my aunt stated in a perfectly sane moment. You know, Len, we could have avoided going back to Kennedy’s if only you had given me the keys before we left home. I would have kept them safe in my purse.”
I had to stifle a laugh. This was going to be an interesting weekend. Finally, we reached the cottage and my uncle let us in. The house was very hot and stuffy. I asked them if I could open a window. I think I was feeling the hot flushes from the cortisone injection because no one, but I, was suffering from the heat.
My aunt made a lovely beef stew for supper and afterwards we sat in the parlor and talked until after eleven o’clock. Finally, my aunt and uncle decided to go off to bed. Since there was no radio or television, we headed off to bed too. We took our dog into the bedroom with us so she wouldn’t bother my aunt and uncle during the night.
My aunt and uncle were very thin frail people who felt the cold more than a younger person did. They turned all the heaters on to the max. I felt like I was suffocating. The heat was appalling. I tried to open my bedroom window, but soon discovered that all the windows in the house were nailed shut. I couldn’t sleep in spite of the fact that I had so little sleep for a week. I was sweating profusely and wished that there was a refrigerator that I could shove my head into.
At some point, I had to go to the washroom. I tiptoed out of my room so I didn’t disturb anyone’s sleep. As I was doing my thing in the bathroom, I heard a huge kafuffle at the other end of the house. I rushed out of the bathroom to find my uncle running through the house with a baseball bat in his hands.
“What happened?” I asked in fright.
“Did you see a huge white bear in the house?” my uncle said looking frightened with his eyes bugging out of his head.
All of a sudden, I put it together. I told him he had been lying down and my dog had gone in and looked at him while he was sleeping. I think she was looking for me, I said. Because he was lying down in a low bed, he had mistakenly thought there was a bear that appeared to be bigger than he was. It took a lot of convincing, but I got him to hand over the baseball bat to me before he killed my dog with it.
I got absolutely no sleep whatsoever again that night. The next day wasn’t much better for my aunt and uncle. He was lost and my aunt seemed to follow him into the world of make believe. I wanted to join them. You have no idea how much I wanted to join them. Their world, just over the reality line, seemed to be more peaceful than mine at that moment. I felt like I had been sucked up into the twilight zone. Severe lack of sleep for days had me wondering if it was they, or I who was out of sync.
I begged my husband to think of some viable reason for us to have to return home to the city the next day. I was too mentally obliterated to come up with an excuse on my own that would fly. My husband came through like the champ that he was; he told them he had to go to work the next day for an important meeting.
Even though my aunt and uncle were somewhat disappointed, they accepted that we had to get back home the next day. I felt relieved. While we made the best of the rest of the day, I noticed that periodically my aunt would pick up her purse and dump everything out of it, sort through her treasures, then put it all back into her purse again. I asked her what she was looking for and she said that she would know when she found it.
She never did knitting, but she had a pair of knitting needles in her purse. She also had seven rosary beads, tons of scrap papers with notes written on them and each time she read all the papers.
My uncle said she was probably looking for the house keys in her purse.
“Why would I be looking for the house keys in my purse, Len? They are in the glove compartment in the car where they always are,” she said matter-of-factly.
I wanted to laugh out loud, but the look on my uncle’s face stunned me even more.
“What keys are in the glove box, Mary?” he innocently asked.
“For heaven’s sakes, Len, the house keys,” my aunt stated.
“Which house keys, Mary?” he asked.
“Well, you should know. Our house keys, of course.”
“I have our house keys right here in my pocket. Look,” my uncle said as he drew the keys from his pocket and put them on the table. He failed to remember that the ones he had in his pocket were the spare ones he had picked up from Kennedy’s.
“I don’t know what keys you are referring to, Mary,” my uncle said.
“Keys… who said anything about keys? I was looking for my crystal rosary.”
I had to leave the room before I laughed out loud in their faces. The two of them were taking turns at sanity as they drove me beyond what I remembered of sanity myself.
I don’t know how I managed to pull it off, but I convinced both of them that another day had gone by and it was time to head back home to the city. So that afternoon, my husband drove all of us home.
Finally, once we were home in the smelly, noisy city, I opened all my windows to let the stale city air in. At least it was moving air. My error in judgement was in thinking that I needed a break from the cobwebs on my ceilings.
No illness is fun, but at times, funny things can happen. My aunt had Alzheimer’s and my uncle had another form of ‘sometimes’ dementia. Most of the time, my uncle was totally mentally together, but the odd day, he was lost. Reading the following true story will no doubt leave you slightly off center. Just imagine if you had to experience it in real life like I had done. I honestly think I am still slightly unbalanced from the experience.
About fifteen years ago, I suffered a horrendously painful back injury. It took a long time before I was barely able to walk. My injury ended up costing me my job.
Like many people who work, I longed for my holidays so I could get things done that I didn’t have time to get to while working at my job. There were things like cobwebs in the corners of my ceilings, mending, painting and washing windows, just to name a few of the tasks that I had been saving up to fill in my time during holidays. Oh, yes, I longed for the time to do things and with my injury, I had nothing but time on my hands. The unfortunate thing was that I no longer had the physical ability to do the things that I finally had time to do.
While I was in the worst time of my injury, all I could do was lie on my back and stare at the ceiling. The offending cobwebs in particular, took on a life of their own. At first, there seemed to be only small webs in the corners, but as the weeks passed by with me flat out on my back, the webs grew in numbers. They were everywhere. As the web ropes grew larger, they attracted more and more dust. Some of the ropey webs broke and hung down in a straight line. I tried to grab one, but it hung just out of my reach to torment me as it swung back and forth from the breeze of an open window. It fluttered in slow motion and dropped visible particles of dust on me.
When I could no longer bear the pain in my back, I called my doctor and she said she could give me a cortisone injection right into the site of the pain. I begged her to give me the injection. I had aspirations of finally being pain free; if only for a few months.
The pain from the injection was intolerable. Tears squirted out at will as I stood leaning over the examining table. While doing the deed, the doctor explained some of the nasty side effects from cortisone injections such as rapid heartbeats, profuse sweating, and weird dreams, just to name a few.
The mere mention of weird dreams sounded delightful to me because it suggested that sleep was now a possibility. In that past week, I had only had less than two hours of uninterrupted sleep. More than likely the lack of sleep greatly contributed to my mental condition at that time.
The injection was done on a Wednesday after a totally sleepless night the night before. Weird dreams or not, I was looking forward to being able to sleep pain free for a change.
I arrived home to hear the phone ringing. My Uncle had called to invite my husband and me to his country cottage for the long weekend. It was May, and it was the first weekend that he and my aunt were going to open the cottage for the season. I readily accepted. At least I could relax now that I had the injection and I wouldn’t have to lie on my back and stare at the cobwebs on my own ceiling. I was sure that another focus was going to be a welcome change for me… and sleep would be great in the quiet countryside.
It was determined that we would go with my aunt and uncle in their car. I felt safer that way, just in case my uncle was having an ‘off’ day, we wouldn’t have to worry about him driving and getting lost. While I couldn’t drive, my husband could share the driving with my uncle. We were supposed to be there for five days. When my husband arrived home from work, we packed up our bags and our Samoyede dog and waited for my uncle to arrive.
For some reason, I was nominated to ride in the front seat with my uncle. As soon as I got into the car, I noticed that the gas gauge was reading empty. I pointed this out to my uncle and mentioned that there was a gas station about a minute’s drive up the road. He acknowledged my concern and said that he had plenty of gas to make it to his cottage. I knew differently. The gauge was reading empty and we had a good two hour’s ride ahead of us. As he blew by the gas station and headed for the highway, I had no doubt in my mind that we were going to be in trouble within a few minutes. With my aunt and uncle both frail individuals in their eighties and me physically out of commission, the only one left to push the car would have been my husband. As soon as that thought crossed my mind, my uncle suddenly let out an expletive and pulled over to the side of the road. My heart pounded in fear because I didn’t know what had just freaked him out.
I asked my uncle what was wrong and he said he just realized he had no gas. He swore at us because he said someone should have told him he was out of gas. I shook my head and asked my husband to drive to the nearest gas station. So, right there on the side of the highway, we all got out of the car and everyone changed places.
Riding on fumes and a few prayers, we made it to a gas station and filled up the tank. I was reluctant to let my uncle drive us the rest of the way because he seemed to be wandering in and out of sanity. At that point, my uncle refused to allow my husband to drive. He said he could manage it by himself. I prayed the rest of the way along the highway.
At some point, in my state of fear and pain, I tuned into the chatter between my aunt and uncle in the front seats.
“Where are the house keys?” he asked my aunt.
“What house keys?” she replied.
“The ones I gave you as we were leaving the house in town,” he said.
“Did you give me keys when we were leaving? Why do we need them if we are going to the cottage?”
“That’s what I told you. How are we going to get in, if we don’t have the keys for the cottage?” my uncle stated in exasperation.”For God’s sake Mary, look in your purse.”
My aunt readily obeyed and lifted her jumbo purse from the floor and opened it on her lap without saying another word. She pulled out all sorts of paraphernalia and loaded it up on her lap and on the seat beside her. I kind of lost interest in what she was doing as she rummaged through all the stuff she pulled out. I did see her open the glove compartment and put something inside then slam it shut. I didn’t see what it was though. Soon after that, my aunt started reading some scraps of paper she had found in her purse.
Suddenly, my uncle shattered the long silence by asking my aunt where the keys were.
“What keys are you talking about, Len?” my aunt asked.
My husband and I looked at each other and smiled. The conversation was getting nuttier and nuttier.
“Mary,” he said patiently, “before we left home, I gave you a bunch of keys to put in your purse so we would know where the keys to the cottage are when we get there. Do you have any keys in your purse now?”
“Let me check, Len,” my aunt replied and began again to empty the contents of her purse onto her lap. “Aha!” she exclaimed, “I have been looking for that rosary for a long time and now I found it. See, Len.”
“Never mind the rosary, Mary. That’s not going to help us get into the house. Where are the keys?”
“What keys, Len?” my aunt asked in all seriousness, obviously forgetting why she had been looking in her purse in the first place.
“The Kennedy’s have a spare set of keys. I’ll have to turn around and go back to their house to get their keys.”
“Why do you want the Kennedy’s keys, Len? Are we going to stay there tonight?”
“No, Mary. The Kennedy’s have our keys,” my uncle said.
“Oh, I see. Why don’t we just go to our cottage and call them and invite them over for the evening and they can bring the keys with them.”
My uncle unceremoniously turned the car around and headed towards where Kennedy’s lived.
“Mary, don’t you remember, we don’t have a phone at the cottage. Even if we did, we cannot get in without the keys.”
“Yes, we can, Len. All we have to do is pick up our spare keys from the Kennedy’s,” my aunt stated in a perfectly sane moment. You know, Len, we could have avoided going back to Kennedy’s if only you had given me the keys before we left home. I would have kept them safe in my purse.”
I had to stifle a laugh. This was going to be an interesting weekend. Finally, we reached the cottage and my uncle let us in. The house was very hot and stuffy. I asked them if I could open a window. I think I was feeling the hot flushes from the cortisone injection because no one, but I, was suffering from the heat.
My aunt made a lovely beef stew for supper and afterwards we sat in the parlor and talked until after eleven o’clock. Finally, my aunt and uncle decided to go off to bed. Since there was no radio or television, we headed off to bed too. We took our dog into the bedroom with us so she wouldn’t bother my aunt and uncle during the night.
My aunt and uncle were very thin frail people who felt the cold more than a younger person did. They turned all the heaters on to the max. I felt like I was suffocating. The heat was appalling. I tried to open my bedroom window, but soon discovered that all the windows in the house were nailed shut. I couldn’t sleep in spite of the fact that I had so little sleep for a week. I was sweating profusely and wished that there was a refrigerator that I could shove my head into.
At some point, I had to go to the washroom. I tiptoed out of my room so I didn’t disturb anyone’s sleep. As I was doing my thing in the bathroom, I heard a huge kafuffle at the other end of the house. I rushed out of the bathroom to find my uncle running through the house with a baseball bat in his hands.
“What happened?” I asked in fright.
“Did you see a huge white bear in the house?” my uncle said looking frightened with his eyes bugging out of his head.
All of a sudden, I put it together. I told him he had been lying down and my dog had gone in and looked at him while he was sleeping. I think she was looking for me, I said. Because he was lying down in a low bed, he had mistakenly thought there was a bear that appeared to be bigger than he was. It took a lot of convincing, but I got him to hand over the baseball bat to me before he killed my dog with it.
I got absolutely no sleep whatsoever again that night. The next day wasn’t much better for my aunt and uncle. He was lost and my aunt seemed to follow him into the world of make believe. I wanted to join them. You have no idea how much I wanted to join them. Their world, just over the reality line, seemed to be more peaceful than mine at that moment. I felt like I had been sucked up into the twilight zone. Severe lack of sleep for days had me wondering if it was they, or I who was out of sync.
I begged my husband to think of some viable reason for us to have to return home to the city the next day. I was too mentally obliterated to come up with an excuse on my own that would fly. My husband came through like the champ that he was; he told them he had to go to work the next day for an important meeting.
Even though my aunt and uncle were somewhat disappointed, they accepted that we had to get back home the next day. I felt relieved. While we made the best of the rest of the day, I noticed that periodically my aunt would pick up her purse and dump everything out of it, sort through her treasures, then put it all back into her purse again. I asked her what she was looking for and she said that she would know when she found it.
She never did knitting, but she had a pair of knitting needles in her purse. She also had seven rosary beads, tons of scrap papers with notes written on them and each time she read all the papers.
My uncle said she was probably looking for the house keys in her purse.
“Why would I be looking for the house keys in my purse, Len? They are in the glove compartment in the car where they always are,” she said matter-of-factly.
I wanted to laugh out loud, but the look on my uncle’s face stunned me even more.
“What keys are in the glove box, Mary?” he innocently asked.
“For heaven’s sakes, Len, the house keys,” my aunt stated.
“Which house keys, Mary?” he asked.
“Well, you should know. Our house keys, of course.”
“I have our house keys right here in my pocket. Look,” my uncle said as he drew the keys from his pocket and put them on the table. He failed to remember that the ones he had in his pocket were the spare ones he had picked up from Kennedy’s.
“I don’t know what keys you are referring to, Mary,” my uncle said.
“Keys… who said anything about keys? I was looking for my crystal rosary.”
I had to leave the room before I laughed out loud in their faces. The two of them were taking turns at sanity as they drove me beyond what I remembered of sanity myself.
I don’t know how I managed to pull it off, but I convinced both of them that another day had gone by and it was time to head back home to the city. So that afternoon, my husband drove all of us home.
Finally, once we were home in the smelly, noisy city, I opened all my windows to let the stale city air in. At least it was moving air. My error in judgement was in thinking that I needed a break from the cobwebs on my ceilings.
The End