A Scary Day

Hi Elizabeth,

Well, we sure had a bad scare this morning here at Pearl's. As I have probably mentioned at least once, I don't often get a full 8 hours of sleep during nighttime hours, because Pearl herself rarely sleeps through the night. Her biological clock gets turned around backwards, which is a phenomenon known as "sundowning" in people with dementia. So, very often she will think it's morning at Midnight, and I will have to actually show her the black night sky, looking through the window, to convince her otherwise. Or she might wake up at 2:30am, fully dressed and ready for breakfast. Many nights - more often than not - she wakes up on average about twice a night, say at around 2:30am and then again between 4 and 5am. And the reason I am alerted to this is because of Kobi the dog. He follows Pearl everywhere, he sleeps in her room, and when she wakes up, so does he.

And then he starts barking, and he has a very loud, sharp bark.

So the point of this preamble is to point out that during normal sleeping hours, I don't get consistent sleep. My sleep is broken up into 2 hour stretches almost every night. Consequently, by the time the Sun comes up, I am still not fully rested. You can always tell, afterward, by whether or not you can remember dreaming. If you can remember it, that means you had some REM sleep, which is the important kind.

Well, nowdays, because Pearl is nocturnal, I have been getting my REM sleep somewhere between the hours of about 7 and 10am. Prior to that, I sleep in one to two hour stretches as mentioned above, because the doggie barks and I wake up.

So, this morning was the usual pattern, and at about 6:15am I was up for the third time, and at that point I gave Pearl her breakfast, and I fed Kobi too. Then I went back to sleep.

He barked one more time at around 8am, and I came out to let him out front to go to the bathroom. Now I was exhausted, so I went back to sleep once again.

Finally I got a little quality sleep, and when I woke up, it was a few minutes after 10am.

Pearl has a cleaning lady, and she comes over every Tuesday, usually about 11am. This time she was a few minutes early, and I heard her coming in just as I was putting on my shoes. We both converged in the living room, and I said "hi", and I noticed Pearl was not in the living room, where she would usually be. So I went to her bedroom, because sometimes when she's been awake all night, she goes back to bed and falls asleep in the morning, after eating breakfast.

But she wasn't in her bedroom.

Well, that has happened a couple times before, and the house is not big; it's a 1950s mid-century modern tract home, you can walk the whole thing in less than a minute. I scanned the bathrooms and then went out directly into the front porch area. No Pearl.

By now I was pretty nervous. I walked rapidly into the backyard. No Pearl.

Several months ago, around December of 2015, we took away Pearl's key to the front gate, because she had had an episode where she had come out onto the porch area at night, in the cold, when I was not there, and she had closed the front door behind her, and she had locked herself out. And she had been out in the very cold night for about a half hour before our neighbor heard her calling out. Our neighbor has a key, and that time she let Pearl back inside the house.

But the final barrier to the street is a locked iron gate that separates the house and porch area from the driveway and street. Her daughter and I figured that it was best to let her keep the front door key, in case she ever got locked out of the house again (even though she really doesn't know how to use the key anymore), but we also decided that it was very important to take away her key to the front gate.

Because if she ever did go out the front door when I was not here, at least the front gate would be locked, and she could go no further than the porch. Without a key to the gate, she could not get off the property.

Or so we thought.

Well, back to this morning. After I checked the house and backyard, I very quickly went from being nervous to highly stressed. I realised : "She's not on the property". She's gone. Pearl is 91 and has moderate but advancing dementia. Holy smokes.

Both the cleaning lady and I jumped in our cars and drove in separate directions. "You go that way and I'll go this way"! We combed the neighborhood, which is old style Valley from the 1950s. It's all residential for about a half mile in every direction. It's one big housing tract, with quiet streets. I thought, "well, however Pearl got out, she can't have wandered far". Pearl moves very slowly. On dogwalks it takes us fifteen to twenty minutes just to get to the end of our 1/8th mile street.

But as I drove through the curving streets, I wasn't seeing her, and I started to get very, very, worried.

And I wondered, "how the hell did she get out"?

And then it hit me : "Oh yeah.....Tuesday is also the day the gardener comes. And he always leaves the gate open as he works from the front to the back yard. The gardener has a key, too.

So somehow, a Perfect Storm of circumstance had struck, and Pearl had first gone out the front door, which she never does anymore, and then she had gone out the open gate......

.......and all when I was asleep.

I felt horrible as I was driving, looking for her. But I thought, "I have to sleep sometime". I couldn't help it.

It would never have occured to me in a million years that she'd even go out the door onto the porch, let alone out a gate that just happened to be open.......because it was Tuesday.......when the gardener comes...

I was not yet in panic mode, because I always try to gather myself when situations arise. "Maybe she tried to walk to church". Tuesday is Golden Agers day, as you know. The church is a quarter mile down the street.

I drove there and went in. No Pearl. No one had seen her.

So I drove back to the house, and thinking back on the events of the morning, I would say I was still not panicking, but I was certainly praying, and thinking - analyzing - a mile a minute.

The cleaning lady drove up a moment after I arrived, and I said, "she's not at the church......I guess I'll have to call 911".

I've never had to call 911 before, for any reason.

But I did, and gave the operator all the details. Pearl's description, etc.

"We'll send someone over", she told me. "In the meantime, you can try calling the nearest hospital".

I had been thinking all the things that run through your head when something like this happens : "Did she fall down? Could some weirdo have picked her up? Good Lord, what could it be"?

I am her caregiver, and even though I try my best every day, it's not easy to keep up with a person who has dementia. Such a person is usually slow moving, but in other ways - ways that you don't always think of - they can be relentless. People with dementia get urges. Urges to "go home", to a remembered childhood location. Or to any number of other places and scenarios. And when they are in the grip of such an urge, they can fixate on it for days. And because a person with dementia basically does not sleep, in anything resembling a normal pattern, the caregiver really has to be on his or her toes to keep up.

Dementia creates a very slow but extremely determined kind of energy. And it can be relentless.

So I called 911. And the police came. I gave them the basic rundown, and they said they were gonna drive the streets themselves first, before resorting to a missing persons report. They said they'd check Northridge Hospital, too. It's about a mile away.

In the meantime, while they were gone, I drove back to the church. "Please God", I was thinking....but no Pearl.

I called Pearl's daughter to give her the news, and it was no fun to do so. Really scary it was, at this point.

Five minutes later I was back at the house again, and now the cleaning lady and I were both standing out front, scanning the street with our eyes and waiting for the police to return. A couple of neighbors had noticed all the commotion and inquired what had happened, and gave sympathies.

I was in and out of the house, with nervous energy. On the phone with her daughter.

Then, from out the dining room window, I saw the police car pull in to the driveway.

When I saw the backdoor open, and saw an officer get out of the back door, I instinctually knew they'd found Pearl. I walked out the front door, past the porch and through the gate.....

....and there was Pearl, being helped out of the front seat of the squad car (they use SUVs now) by the officer.

Thank You, Lord.

"We found her up on Stagg Street". A half mile away! How did she get that far?

"She was sitting in a chair in front of a house, the people who live there had seen her..."....

Me : "Thank you, officers. You really saved the day".

I thanked them profusely, for I had driven past that same spot on my search earlier, and hadn't seen her.

The stress of what had happened didn't hit me until a little while later.

And it has kinda wiped me out today. It was a very scary episode indeed.

God bless the LAPD and thanks to them for finding her. I am so glad she was safe and unharmed.

We are gonna make sure that the gardener locks the gate every time he passes through it, from now on.

And we are also gonna see if Pearl's doctor can prescribe anything that might help her "sundowning", to maybe improve her sleep pattern and hopefully turn her hours around back to normal.

So that's my report for today. I am so grateful that things turned out okay.

Such is the job of a caregiver.

I hope all is going well for you.

xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxooxoxxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo  :):)