To Anyone on My Waiting List....

I was supposed to be back home right after New Year's. However, my plans were changed due to I guess what you could call a family emergency.  My 80 year old grandmother has been suffering with what I guess you could call dementia for years now.  She does and says things and then can't remember doing them a few days or even a few hours later.  She has extreme bouts of paranoia, so much so she won't even let us open the blinds because she thinks people are in the bushes looking in.  She hears and see things that aren't there.  She rarely bathes or brushes her teeth.  She doesn't take her insulin or eat when she's supposed to.  She hoards.  She lies pathologically.  It's just always something.

Like I said, we've been dealing with what we call her fits for years, but recently they've been getting more and more violent. She's tried to hit us on several occasions and has succeeded on a few.  A few weeks before Christmas she threatened to throw boiling water on my sister. Then right after New Year's, when I was set to drive back to Atlanta the next day, she hid the only working phone in the house and then sprayed what had to be half a bottle of Red Door perfume all throughout the house.  She did that knowing I'm deathly allergic to perfume and that my sister and nephew had asthma.  As if that weren't bad enough, while I'm sitting there, with my throat swelling shut and no way to call 911, she tells me in the most malicious tone possible that she doesn't give a damn about any of us and that if I died from the perfume, she wouldn't cry at my funeral.

As you can imagine that was the last straw.  If she would do that with perfume, who's to say she wouldn't use a loaded gun next time, and yes, there are loaded guns in her house for her to do so.  We planned a family intervention, just like you see on A&E, made her sit down and listen to us, the whole nine yards, in order to try to get her to go with us to a doctor.  However, she flipped out and said the only way she would go is if a cop took her.

So first thing this past Monday morning my sister and I got up, went to the probate court, and filled out paperwork so a cop could do just that.  My grandmother then flipped out on the sheriff's deputy who came to get her, refusing to go anywhere with him. He called for backup. She flipped out on both of them then, threatened to hit them and throw herself down the stair, even brought up the guns at some point. In the end it took three sheriff's deputies and a set of handcuffs just to get her to the ER.

The ER ended up sending her for evaluation at the place where they do the five day evals, but yesterday they let her out, two days short, so apparently she put on the poor, abused grandmother routine she puts on for the neighbors.  She basically has them all convinced we're abusing her and trying to kill her in her sleep so we can have her house.  That's part of the reason I'm still staying with my sister.  The neighbors--people who've barely said five words to her in ten years--have all ganged up on us, claiming my good, upstanding Christian grandmother isn't a liar and we are.  My sister has been scared to stay alone.  She's alternated between being mad at the neighbors and my grandmother to rationalizing all of my grandmother's behavior and feeling guilty to believing we did the right thing.  I've spent most of this week staying up to 4 am with her, trying to calm her down, getting two hours of sleep before we have to get up to take my nephew to school, and then trying to get a few more hours of sleep before we have to go pick him up again.  In other words, I've barely gotten any work done, and I'm sorry for that.

Right now we're waiting for the fallout of my grandmother coming home.  Two nurses brought her home yesterday, but she was gone again when we got back from picking up my nephew.  We know there will be fallout of some sort. At the very least she's probably going to cut off my sister's cable and internet today so if you email me and I don't get back to you immediately, please don't be offended. I'm not ignoring you. I'll email you just as soon as I get home.  We're pretty sure she's going to start the legal proceedings to have my sister kicked out as well so I guess what we're really waiting on is to see if the cops show up and arrest us based on one of her fantasy stories or serve us with restraining orders or what. 

So if I don't end up in jail, I'm planning on going home this weekend. I can't just keep sitting here waiting to see what happens. I have to get back to my life and my job.  I will try to get as much work done as I can today, at least until the internet gets turned off. Then as soon as I'm home, I promise I'll fly through the designs just as quickly as I can.  Again I'm so sorry for the delay.