I’m a bit overwhelmed and I can’t keep up with everything I set out to do, but I’ve learned (thanks to all my chronicles) that there’s no need to punish yourself, you have to accept your reality in real-time, be grateful that you’re a mess, enjoy being in the here and now, and laugh at the adversities life throws at you minute by minute (I was going to say day by day, but in my case, the universe throws things at me at a faster pace). After this brief introduction, I’ll tell you that today I want to talk about things that shouldn’t be discussed (in public). Yeah, yeah, I don’t really care about any of that… Let me tell you…

As I move forward with these Caregiver Chronicles, I’ve shared my frustrations, my feelings, my situations, I’ve remembered the past, given explanations, tried to show what life as a caregiver is like, and even shared little things that happen to me. Today, I want to go further, I want to be descriptive, and I want you to understand it from a more graphic and uncomfortable perspective (for you, because I’m already past it).

If you’re regular readers of my chronicles, you know my current situation as a caregiver for my mother (if this is the first chronicle you’re reading, ufff, I’m really sorry, there’s much more behind this, I invite you to read the rest to catch up). The current situation changes day by day, and it’s not for the better. Senile dementia (Alzheimer’s) is a degenerative disease, and even though I thought my mother’s case wouldn’t be so radical, we’ve reached the point where it is. Every day, she surprises us with something different, and even though we try to laugh at the situation, there comes a point where the laughter turns into a state of mental freezing, not knowing which way to turn, not knowing what to do, and all the emotions I’ve already mentioned—sadness, anger, despair, anxiety, guilt, denial, etc.—come together and mix into a soup of reality that starts melting the freezing.

Let’s get started, so I don’t keep going on about my woes. I titled this chronicle “Hygiene” because it’s one of the aspects of the decline in this disease that has just come to light. Memory is a curious thing; you may forget names of people, everyday things, but when you start forgetting how to write, how to read, how to eat, and how to go to the bathroom, that’s when we enter another phase of life. Okay, I’ll tell you in a funny way, otherwise, I don’t think you’ll finish reading this.

Every morning, we wake up to see what my mother has done, what little gifts she’s left us, and what she’s wearing. Yes, yes, what she’s wearing… It seems that at night, she gets disoriented and doesn’t know how to get to the bathroom, so she decides to pee or poop wherever she sees fit—could be in the bed, on the floor, or on a chair. Then, she seems to realize it’s wrong and starts trying to fix the situation. This is when she leaves little pieces of poop all around the house, takes off her pajamas, opens the wardrobe, and puts, for example, a t-shirt as a skirt, folds her wet pajamas that she took off and hides them (there are still things we haven’t found), and places objects in random spots, like balancing slippers on top of the TV, whole rolls of toilet paper in the toilet… I could go on, but I think you get the point. And I know what you’re thinking, “Nuria, why don’t you put her in diapers?” Let me see, what part of what I’ve told you about her TAKING EVERYTHING OFF don’t you understand? Hahaha… diapers are expensive, and seeing that they don’t help at all doesn’t help much.

Every day, it’s becoming harder to care for her and attend to her needs. Right now, I have the help of my son and the wonderful Yoli (who has the patience of a saint), but we’re starting to realize that, although we want to care for her until the end, it might be time to reconsider other alternatives for the well-being of everyone.