the wedding that is'nt

Today is either the start of the wedding or maybe it is nearly over - anyhow, the nurse and I had to bask in the afterglow - mom sparkled like a dew drop the entire day - after all the years of being ignored by dad's family, every single one of his nine younger brothers and sisters had apparently turned up for the wedding - she finally went to bed, exhausted by her imaginary exertions in getting the events to run smoothly, but smug in her conviction that the turnout was certainly a testament to her popularity as the self-appointed family matriarch

Getting her to eat was the big thing today - she greeted each meal with an astonished insistence that she had just finished the big wedding supper, and how on earth was she supposed to eat more? However, her self-preserving instincts feebly flicker on, and when I insist that she cannot have her meds without eating something, she agrees solemnly, declaring "i do have to keep my engines running, what with everyone here"

In writing about my mom I will only use the generic drug names over specific manufacturer names, since I usually end up finally googling with the generic drug name to get global info and user comments.

Mom was on Imipramine for a month after we returned from the hospital- to stop her bed flooding each dawn - doing the whole replace bottom sheet, then the protective plastic sheet, then the draw sheet, and finally the underpad, each morning, proved to be a massive drain on our already caffeine-bereft early morning energies. My dad figured that telling her strictly to inform us when she wanted to pee would do the trick, but two days of her insisting that she had not yet peed, while a pale yellow stain bloomed gently under her was enough to get him to agree to raise the issue with the doctors. So Imipramine it was. The bed-wetting miraculously stopped, and dry sheets greeted us each morning.

No one told us that a possible side effect of Imipramine - a powerful pre-SSRI era antidepressant - is mania and hypomania - so when she spent the last two weeks weakly shouting cusses like a foul-mouthed drunken sailor at my dad and the nurse, we really did not connect it to the morning dry sheets - Blessedly, the doctors finally made the connection and she is off Imipramine.

Her current meds are Sodium Valproate 500mg tabs 1-0-1; Mirtazapine 7.5mg 0-0-1; and Olanzapine 5mg 0-0-1 along with vitamins - and - calcium - which she takes both nasally and as tabs - her bones being as brittle as a potato chip..