It's 1:00am and I was awakened by Mama.  This is the fourth time tonight she has asked me to take her to pee.  But this time she says she has to poop real bad, so I get her walker, get her up and we head for the Bathroom.  The bathroom is just fifteen steps away.  Her nighttime potty chair is two steps away.  She wants to go to the bathroom.

 

We start for the bathroom and about the sixth step, I step in a pile of Shit.  I look down and see that Mama has been pooping as she is walking, dropping little piles from the bed to the bathroom, and hasn't said anything to me.

 

We're at the bathroom now, so I just sit her on the Toilet and tell her not to get up when she finishes, and I'll be right back.  I hop into the kitchen and use a shop rag from under the sink to clean off my shitty foot.  I fetch a roll of paper towels, a garbage bag, carpet spray cleaner, a bag of shop towels, and air freshener and return to Mama.  While she is sitting on the toilet finishing up, I clean each small pile of shit, seven in all, from the bed to the bath.  I scrape it up with the paper towel, drop it in the garbage bag, spray the spot with rug cleaner, and scrub the shit out of it with a shop rag, then drop the rag into the bag, too.  It takes me about 20 minutes to barely clean up the spots, knowing I'll have to go back later and really scrub them.  But they need gone now so Mama doesn't walk through them again on the way back to bed.

 

The bathroom is very tiny.  There is no turn around space at all.  Mama enters the bathroom with her walker pushing it all the way up against the tub, and then just has enough room to sit on the toilet, and then stand and back out with the walker while I hold her waist to steady her.

 

When she says she is finished, I help her stand and tell her to turn toward the walker and hold the handles to back out.  That's when I see she has walked in the shit, too, and has it on her socks spreading it all over the bath rugs, and she has shit all over the back of her gown, her ass, her legs, and up her back and all over the toilet seat and it's dipping onto the floor now.  I just want to cry.  I'm so tired and need sleep so badly, and now I have hours of clean up to do.

 

I'm unable to hold her up, and she is unable to stand for very long, so I have to get her stripped and into the shower to wash her off.  Mama is crying now because she doesn't want to take a shower.  She says it's too cold, but it's not.  She just hates showers.  She always has hated them, and took sponge baths in the sink for years instead of baths or showers.  She always smelled bad.  As soon as she was invalid, I signed up a bath assistant to bathe her twice a week.  She hates it, but it's a point I will not compromise upon.  She keeps saying she is sorry, and I keep assuring her that it's not her fault and I really don't mind taking care of her.  She finally calms down and relaxes.

 

I step away, four steps to the thermostat, and turn it up to 78 degrees from 72 degrees.  I call out to my husband with guilt, because I have to have some help and I know he has a training class at 7:00am in the morning.  But he comes to my aid.  I need him to lift the walker out, over my mother's head, and then lift the shower chair in, over my mother's head.  I then walk her into the shower and sit her on the chair.  My husband, bless that man, picks up all the crappy rags and paper on the floor, walks in shit himself and has to clean his feet up, and puts it all in the trash for me.  I tell him to just throw away the shop rags, her gown, everything.  Then I send him back to bed.

 

I spend the next 20 minutes showering shit off Mama.  Then I dry her, put clean clothes on her along with incontinence panties, and walk her back to bed.  She hates the panties, but I can't do this twice in one night.  I tuck her into bed, give her an extra blanket for warmth after the wet shower, and turn off the big overhead light while leaving on the smaller nightlight.

 

I now need to clean the bathroom toilet and floor.  Another thirty minutes is spent cleaning the bathroom, removing shit from crevices, the outer toilet bowl, the grout between the tiles, and the side of the sink.  I place clean shop rags over each spot on the floor where the shit was basically cleaned, so I remember to clean it better in the morning and so no one steps in it before it's completely scrubbed clean.  And I cry some more.  I think about the fact that tomorrow is going to be a very hard day because my husband will be gone at school until 12 noon, and I will be taking care of the baby and Mama by myself until he gets home.

 

I do so much crying lately.  I've never been so depressed in my life or felt so trapped in such a hopeless situation.  I start to go back to bed, and I hear the baby.  The noise and activity has woke him up.  I guess I'll spend another hour rocking him back to sleep.