I didn’t expect anything for our anniversary. How could I, he couldn’t remember he had a sore foot, immediately after telling me his foot hurt.

Unfortunately, I did get an anti-anniversary gift.

The day started off well enough. Jim was standing up a little more solidly, so I upgraded him to pull-ups during the day. He also used the actual toilet for the first time since coming home from the hospital. Both huge wins.

Then we went to bed and the nightmare began.

He woke up at 11:15pm and started trying to get up. He woke me from a dead sleep when his foot hit the barricade I’d set up to alert me when he tried to get up. So I was probably a little grumpy.

In response, he started being very belligerent toward me and called me by his first wife’s name. Let’s just say there were several valid reasons why he divorced her ass. Being called her name would have crushed me on a regular day, but on our wedding anniversary… yeah.

He insisted on getting dressed, so I gave in. Then he asked for food. I heated up some leftover chili and he ate half of it. I’ll take that as a win. (He hasn’t been eating a lot lately.)

It was more than a little hair-raising because he wouldn’t let me near him, forgetting completely he had a foot infection and couldn’t stand properly. Yet, he kept trying to get up. He’d cruise along the couch and back like a baby learning to walk.

I had two choices: crowd him and make him pull away quickly, risking a bad fall, or stay away and hope he tumbles in slow motion and doesn’t get hurt. A fall seemed inevitable unless I tied him down, which would have led to fisticuffs, so not an option.

The second type of fall happened. He was able to catch himself on the way down.

Still calling me by his ex wife’s name, he laid flat out on the floor and shouted at me to stay away.

I waited for a few minutes and tried again. This time with a super soft voice and called him Babe. It worked, he knew who I was, and let me help him get back to the chair.

It took twenty minutes to get him up once he let me start helping him. It was our best floor-to-chair time yet.

After that, he seemed to have the stuffing knocked out of him and we got undressed again and climbed back into bed. It was 2:35am.

Forty-five minutes later, he was up again. Same scenario except he wasn’t calling me by his ex-wife’s name. Probably because this time I was too tired to be cranky and didn’t trigger him.

After I got him dressed, he wanted more food. So I got another half serving of chili in his belly along with some Boost/Ensure/Glucerna. (I use whichever is on sale.)

This time, there wasn’t a fall, but a lot of talk about kids sports, work, and the mysterious and sometimes scary people in the room with us. It wasn’t until I walked through where the group of hallucinatory-men were supposedly standing, that his anxiety eased and we headed back to bed. It was 5:30am. We were up again before seven.

For the first time ever, I requested drugs to ease his hallucinations and delusions. The doctor put him on a very low dose of Risperidone. I had the pills by suppertime that day.

Day 1 – we were both already exhausted from the night before so we slept. I have no idea if the drugs helped him or not.

Day 2 –  Jim went to bed earlier than I did. (This is the 4th or 5th time I’ve been able to stay up later than him – progress) He roused when I went to bed and then we both fell asleep. It was almost midnight when he started banging against the barricade trying to get up. This time instead of being called by his ex wife’s name, he told me that she was going to kick my ass for sleeping with him. He knew my name but couldn’t compute that he and I were married. He also claimed to have two more children who I’d never heard of before. He felt bad because he couldn’t remember their names. I had to leave the room so he wouldn’t see me smile.

This time I didn’t have to get him dressed. I put him in the wheelchair and took him on a tour of our house so he could see where he was.

I found it funny/fascinating that he didn’t want me sleeping with him but he let me put him to bed and change his wet diaper.

I dozed on his big comfy new lift recliner until he called out for me an hour later, wondering why I wasn’t in bed with him. We got a solid four more hours of sleep before his next escape attempt. Happily, it was just before my alarm sounded.

During the day today, he napped heavily but was awake, alert and pretty easy going (albeit still delusional about where and when he was) and then crashed heavily around 8pm.

Tonight is day 3 of the new drugs. They could take a couple of weeks to work themselves into his system, so I’m just hoping he’s tired enough to  stay asleep through the night tonight.

Keeping my fingers crossed because Mama is tired!