Caregiver Chronicles VII: Rage
I called 911 tonight. I felt guilty about doing that because I knew all I wanted was someone else to help calm Douglas down and I wasn’t going to have them take him to the hospital as I might have. Two weeks ago, when my son-in-law, a physician, heard Douglas shouting at me in the background, while we were on the phone, he said “My God, he’s lost his mind, maybe he should be hospitalized!” And that gave me the idea, first, that maybe he should be hospitalized. Meanwhile, at least I could calm him down if I scared him enough…
For the last three days, Douglas has been consumed by a delusion that the house sits on a couple of unstable “tables” of ground, little tectonic plates, in effect, that put the house at risk of slipping sideways and falling into a giant hole. You can’t say he’s not inventive. At the same time, he imagines a group of people are in the house with us, for whom he feels responsibility, and we must get everyone out of the house and call someone to save us. I say we but he means me. I have to participate in this delusion; he wants me to call someone, or to open the door so that we can go out into the very cold evening and I can shout out so the neighbors can hear us that we need to be rescued. Last week the delusion was about two young European girls who were sent to us and, as our responsibility, had to be picked up. Again, that responsibility became mine and my inaction (or more precisely inability to defuse or distract from the delusion) was a source of Douglas’s high decibel rage. The week before that the delusion was…oh, God, I don’t remember, but the pattern was the same. So, counting the weeks of more amiable shouting in French, we’ve been at this for six weeks now. And I begin to feel that I have reached the raw, wounded edge of my sanity. I feel like I’m living in an asylum, and I can’t stand the yelling anymore. More than that, much as I know that what he is saying isn’t true, I don’t seem to have the maturity to slough off the insults and accusations. People say to me, “Penny, you know he doesn’t mean it,” or “it’s the illness, it’s not Douglas,” and I say yes, but I still can’t stand listening to it.
These delusions grow. They don’t start in the morning and drift away by night time. This week Douglas has spent the last three nights standing at the corner of the kitchen where the sliding door meets the wall, wearing a shirt, a diaper, socks, and his sun hat, shouting at me to stop being so selfish and help him open the door, then ranting at the top of his voice to “do it, Penny, come HERE, do it, help me, help me, help me,” followed by some of his French incantations garbled by repetition, and some invective about how selfish and cruel and arrogant I am. I sit at the kitchen table holding my head, frozen into inaction. I think of the time my mother, who was crazy, broke her foot while we were staying in a hotel in Paris, and refused to go to a hospital. My father and I, paralyzed, sat and read books in the room for two days while she ranted that we didn’t care. I think of the times she locked herself in her room, crying, while we stood outside begging her to open the door. I know my weakness here.
Today, it started in the morning. After breakfast, when Douglas wouldn’t take his morning pills, I crushed a sedative in his orange juice, but thought I saw some of it still in the bottom of the glass. He got himself up from the table, put on his sun hat and demanded that I let him outside. I opened the door, assuming he would be put off by the cold, but he went outside and made his way to the garage. I could see him standing there in his hat, all urgent business, gesturing me to come. “Get the other people,” he shouted. “You need to save everyone!” Instead, angry at the trap I was in, I went out and got him in the car, told him to shut up, which he rightly said was not very courteous, and careened out the driveway at ridiculous speed and drove around for two hours, not speaking while we both listened to classical music.
When we came home from the ride, Douglas, willing to come back in the house, sat on the edge of the bed, nodding off, until I pushed him back on the bed and put a blanket over him. He slept for an hour and was back at it when he woke up.
Amy and I thought we’d gotten things under control after a three-week increasingly intensive period of shouting and verbally aggressive behavior. On the advice of a doctor, and ignoring Amy’s disapproval, I found where she had hidden a small arsenal of Seroquel, an anti-psychotic that one doctor had prescribed. I had begun to give him half a tablet in the morning and a half at night. I told her I was looking at memory care facilities and Amy is, clearly, very disappointed in me, which hurts. She has been my partner in this enterprise, and I don’t want to fall in her estimation. She spent all the first day of this regimen looking up the terrible side effects of Seroquel on the internet, and she told me that if I put him in a facility, he would be “abandoned.” I reminded her that my intention is to keep Douglas at home, but I can’t take the shouting. The psychiatrist agreed with Amy and said the goal would be to get Douglas off the drug and I had an epiphany…no drugs, no Penny. I can’t do this anymore.
The thing is, until the last few days, the drug has been working. I don’t get it. If I knew how to handle the delusions… Instead I end up telling him he’s wrong — a no-no — and that he’s suffering from dementia and he can’t rely on his mind to give him good information anymore. None of which works.
Anyway, I called 911, hoping the arrival of an ambulance would scare Douglas. He answered the door quite cordially, welcomed the EMTs in as if he had called them and, while I mumbled that I thought I’d gotten a sedative in him by putting it in a bowl of apple sauce he finally came away from the corner to eat, Douglas with great articulation explained about the tectonic plates and the other people in the house, and the fact that he and his wife — me — had a difference of opinion on all this. One EMT said some reassuring things, while the other quietly asked me if he was physically violent and suggested I call 311 and ask for a service I now can’t remember the name of.
After the EMTs left, Douglas said he was sorry and would be happy to take his pills and went to bed like a docile lamb. But here I am, unable to sleep, suffering from a little trauma, I think, and on my computer. I am at the end of my rope. Now I have to get up the nerve to act on that, to find a solution that will be good for both of us.
