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I'm not new to care giving, but I'm new to these constant changes in my mother. For the most part we have her healthy again, but all she wants to do is sleep. For a woman who usually got up at least 10 times a night to use the bathroom and as many times during the day, she is not even getting up twice at night. When she is awake she is always saying she can't hardly keep her eyes open. Is this normal?

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Anxious to hear responses to this question. My father in law is the same. We try to talk to him or maybe go to dinner. Any little activity exhausts him.
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My Mom is the same way, too. She is 91, so that just may be the way it goes at this stage of life. There doesn't seem to be anything major physically wrong with her.
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Do you think she has bladder infection? Or any of her meds making her sleepy?

My mom used to sleep all day and be awake all night. She was like this for years. Then, one night, she continued to sleep - all night. After that, she slept all day and all night. I knew something was up. I happened to mention this and other new stuff she was displaying on the YOU thread, and several posters told me that my mom was close to the end. I was sooo glad that they told me this. It gave time for my 3 out of 4 siblings to get home before mom passed away.

I think, for you all, if your parent is Only showing signs of sleeping all the time, and nothing new, then it's just their disease is progressing.
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No new meds making her this way and no bladder infection. I have no worry free explanation for her sleeping. Which brings me to the dying process, I just dont' know when to start thinking its the beginning.
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How old is your mom? Perhaps she is depressed?
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No sign of depression. She has SDAT and lives just about in the moment.
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How old is your mom and how many years has she had Alzheimer's? The doctors should be able to tell you what stage she's in. She shouldn't be advancing that quickly yet if she's only in the mild or moderate stages. Usually there are many other severe behavioral changes that are happening around the time they start sleeping more. Sometimes it IS undiagnosed depression. Here's where it gets tricky. Is she ever alert? Does she speak with you intelligebly at all? If you have a sense that it's too soon for her to be in this state or ready to be passing, then you need to get her a neuro psych evaluation. You should document your observations and concerns in a letter that you fax or email to her doctor so you aren't the only one who knows about this with the singular burden of making sole decisions. Maybe an appointment with the PCP is warranted, maybe not. That's another question to ask: is it routine to take her to the doctor or has it become more difficult to the point where there is more time between her appointments or you are skipping appointments all together? You are the one who knows her and her abilities more than any other. If you believe she is close to passing away, there is no point in heroic medical intervention because its not going to do any good. The danger here is that if she is just depressed or has some other brain chemistry problem keeping her from better function, the fact that she is lying down most of the time could lead to pneumonia, which can be deadly. Just as in the later stages of Alzheimer's, the patient forgets simple things like how to eat or go to the bathroom, their immune system begins to forget how to function. This is exactly how my mom died. She WAS in end stage, she wanted to sleep so much we could hardly get her up. She still was determined to get up by herself to go to the bathroom, but where that had been multiple times per day, it was decreased to 2 or 3. The lying down lead to pneumonia which her an insistent couldn't handle. They put her on strong antibiotics IV in the hospital but her body would not respond. From there she went into a hospice situation. The entire process took less than two weeks. My sibling was the conservator (legal) and I was he at home caregiver (but had no say - otherwise I'd not have taken her to the hospital and had Hospice at home). In times past, what a friend of mine calls "the olden days", without all the diagnostic capabilities of modern medicine, patients would die without much intervention and it would be termed "natural causes". Hardly anyone died of natural causes today.

Seems my answer turned into a vent and a rant. Sorry 'bout that...
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Correction ... I'm using my Android with voice recognition, which is in perfect.

The lying down lead to pneumonia which her IMMUNE SYSTEM couldn't handle.

Hardly anyone DIES of natural causes today.
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