Bathroom Obsession

Thursday is grocery day. While I’m gone it’s pretty much Grandma and Grandpa alone together. Which means I’m always wondering a bit about what will happen while I’m gone. I return and I pull the car into the garage and start bringing groceries in, casing out the joint as I do so to see if anything is wrong. What has Grandpa been up to while I’m gone.

Today I notice that there is a bag of garbage (not very full) down by the trash can in the garage. The kitchen garbage can doesn’t have a bag in it anymore. The bathroom garbage is missing from the bathroom and a single black shoe of Grandpa’s is on the bathroom floor. Otherwise the house seems pretty much in order.

After I’ve hauled all the groceries up from the car and am about halfway through unpacking Grandma comes out and gives me a whispered recounting of some of the things that happened while I was gone.

“He changed the bathroom garbage while you were gone,” she said. “I don’t know what he did with it.”

“I know,” I said. “And he did the kitchen garbage. I saw the bag downstairs.”

“Oh, he did?” She leaves to do some more investigating on the location of the bathroom garbage can. I go downstairs and retrieve the mostly empty bag to the kitchen garbage can and bring it back upstairs. Untying the bag I check the contents. Mostly there is just the few bits of garbage thrown out that morning–the only thing Grandpa added was the lid to the garbage can itself. I pull the lid out of the trash, put the bag back in the can, and put the lid back on the can.

Grandma arrives carrying the bathroom garbage can and our bedroom garbage can. The bag to the bathroom garbage actually hasn’t been changed as Grandpa thought–it’s still half full with tissues. She tells me she found them in her bathroom. Messing around with garbage cans is a fairly common pass-time for Grandpa. Sometimes I think he does it simply because it feels like a productive and right thing to do. The rest of the time it seems he realizes he has messed up and pissed in the garbage can and so he tries to correct his own mistake. Sometimes he gets it mostly right and does something with the bathroom garbage can . . . the rest of the time he gets side tracked and does something with the wrong garbage can because he remembers that he intended to do something with some garbage can but looses track of which one he intended to work with.

I check the contents of the bathroom garbage can and it does look like he probably urinated in there a bit, but I decide it isn’t worthy of a fresh bag. (His problems with pissing in the garbage can have become sufficiently recurrent that I’ve decide I’ll only change the bag once a day, least I end up going through a whole box of bags in a week. I return the bathroom garbage to its proper location and return to putting away the groceries.

But Grandma has more stories to tell.

“Today he arranged the cushions on the couch in a circle,” she whispers. “Then he told me, ‘I’m going to flush that thing after I take a crap in it.’ I told him, ‘Oh, no you don’t, you do that in the bathroom.’”

Then she continues, “So then he uses the bathroom and afterward calls me in because he says he can’t get it to flush. So I go in there and tell him, ‘You push that lever there to flush the toilet, Pa.’ Then he puts down the toilet seat lid and says, ‘See, it didn’t work.’ And I said, ‘No, you use the lever,’ and then I flushed it. And he said, ‘Oh, I knew that.’”

Her voice drops to a horrified whisper. “And he put his wipings in the sink. I told him, ‘Pa, don’t do that. You’re not supposed to do that with them!’ and he said, ‘Why not?’”

I told her that was all right and I had already been dealing with him putting his behind wipings in various places . . . on the edge of the bathroom sink . . . on top of the dresser in the bedroom. “Ooooh,” Grandma says. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

****

What is a particular significant source of difficulty for Grandpa seems to change from week to week. Recently, he has definitely developed a bathroom obsession. It has become the locus of his anxiety over his inability to preform bathroom functions properly. I think it has been this way for some time, but up until recently Grandpa tried to handle his problems himself. I think it has come to the point now where he no longer feels cognizant of how to fix his problems (real or imagined) and must now call on others to help him through bathroom usage. It isn’t a complete need for assistance . . . but it is starting down that path.

Previously, Grandpa has always wanted Grandma for all his troubles and I had to present myself and tell him I would help him with whatever he needed (Grandma becomes quickly exhausted trying to deal with all of his activities). For most things calling out “Ma!” still seems to be his default reaction. But I have noticed a change in regard to the bathroom. He seems inclined to come to me first, now, about bathroom troubles. It could be he is starting to learn that I am the one who is supposed to be tending to his needs now, and that may be part of it, but I think this is primary because in his confused mind most of the trouble with the bathroom is related to objects in the bathroom malfunctioning, and he knows Grandma is no mechanic so he calls on me to fix the bathroom, or at least assure him that everything is working properly.

It has become quite common for him to call me into the bathroom. Sometimes it is for a garbled dialog about the stuff in the bathroom be in alignment and in order and all set. Other times he will simply ask me to look at the toilet and tell him if everything looks all right, or to make sure it isn’t plugged (when there is nothing but water in the toilet). Another time he asked me to come in and look at the toilet because it wouldn’t flush. So I came in (saw the toilet had nothing in it that needed to be flushed) and told him “You flush it by using this lever.”

“I know,” he said. “But it doesn’t work.” I pushed the lever and the toilet flushed. “The bugger,” Grandpa says. “It wouldn’t–last time it didn’t–” Sinks and toilets are nefarious things now, that break and no longer work only to start working again when someone else uses them.

Grandpa has called me in to check and see if there is water on the floor. There is liquid on the floor. “Is the seal leaking?” he asks. “No,” I say, and clean up the mess. “The seal is just fine. Don’t worry about it.”

Then one time Grandpa got up from the supper table and went to use the bathroom. He came tottering back and motioned for me to come. I go with him in to the bathroom.

“What’s the trouble, Grandpa,” I say. “What do you need help with?”

He points at the toilet. “Wipe it,” he says.

Knowing his habit of obsessively wiping the rim of the toilet, I get a piece of toilet paper and wipe the rim. “There. Is that good?”

“Yeah, that’s good,” he says, and comes over to take his leak.

Grandpa is a great believer in cleanliness, and is greatly disturbed whenever he recognizes his own slovenliness or uncleanliness. Since before I came to live with Grandpa I think he has wiped the rim of the toilet to clean up any possible drip from his urination. As his mind has grown increasingly worse he has taken to coming out of the bathroom carrying his toilet paper used to wipe the rim–in search of a place to dispose of it. But now as his problems with making a mess have increased I think his obsession with cleaning up after himself has become much more confused and obsessed. He knows he makes a mess of things, but he often doesn’t understand how, or how to right the matter. He ends up trying to clean everything that might possibly have become contaminated, and it becomes one confused spiral of imagined cleaning (and attempted setting to right) until Grandpa is so uncertain and mixed up that he must go for help.

****

Tonight there was an example of the confusion of Grandpa’s life.

It was after dinner and he went to the kitchen sink to wash his dentures and put them in water to soak for the night. As usual he got side-tracked by the dishes in the sink, but since it is a harmless diversion and he sometimes will eventually get on to this teeth all by himself, I usually let him fiddle around with the dishes. So I kept half on eye on him but didn’t go to stand over his shoulder and watch his every move.

A little later I heard, “Awww . . . shit. Right down my leg.” I heard some more muttering about the bathroom and related things that made it very clear that someone thought they had just had an accident. I came over to see Grandpa rolling up and pulling up his pant leg as if he was preparing to go wading.

“Having trouble?” I said.

“Yes,” Grandpa said.

“Need to use the bathroom?”

“Yeah, didn’t you hear me? I already did it down my leg.” And Grandpa started off toward the bathroom.

I checked the area by the sink. Early after I moved in Grandpa decided to sleep out in the living room one night and in the middle of the night needed to use the bathroom and ended up (for one reason or another) not making it. On that occasion he got his clothes wet, and made a considerable wet spot on the living room carpet which I had to clean up. A quick inspection of the floor by the kitchen sink showed no wetness on the floor, so I was immediately suspicious as to whether Grandpa had actually had that accident that he imagined.

I checked the sink. The top portion of his dentures were lying in the sink, the hose and sprayer lying in the sink with them. I immediately guessed what had happened: Grandpa, confusedly using the sprayer manages to hit himself (we’ve all done that on one occasion or another) but he is too confused to understand what the sprayer is doing and as soon as he feels the wetness on his pants his mind immediately connects that with wetting himself and now he must deal with this crisis and use the bathroom.

Grandpa is heading toward the bathroom, but Arlan is already using the bathroom that he normally uses. I follow him and explain that the bathroom is in use. He seems momentarily stumped as to how he should proceed, but appears to be considering going into our bedroom. I’m concerned he might decide to relieve himself in there, so I suggest he use Grandma’s bathroom.

He agrees and starts toward Grandma’s bathroom. I decide considering his present state I better follow and make sure he doesn’t do something that puts Grandma into a fit. But Grandpa can be a little irritated and shy having someone watch his every move in the bathroom so I hang back trying to just get a feel for what he is about to do and make sure he doesn’t do something so drastic and peeing in Grandma’s laundry hamper (that really wouldn’t go over well.) Instead, next thing I know I hear a sploosh, sploosh and I quickly glance in to the bathroom to see Grandpa swishing his hands around in the toilet bowl water. He takes a sodden piece of toilet paper and begins washing the inside and rim of the toilet.

At this point some people would freak out. There are certain things that cross some line of tolerance for certain people and certain acts go beyond bearable. Grandma is grossed out to the point of sickness by the thought of finding behind wipings on a dresser. I can take that in stride. I’m not quite sure how Grandma would have reacted to finding Grandpa’s splashing in the toilet water. This is something I had already suspected Grandpa of doing previously when no one saw (once when I asked him to test the shower water and see if I had got it to the right temperature he had lifted the toilet seat to check the toilet water, being saved that time only by my correction,) and so wasn’t very surprised to catch him at it now. Somehow, splashing around in the toilet water strikes me as a little more cross and uncleanly than leaving your butt wipings in the sink or on the dresser, but I suppressed the wince and refrained from verbally jumping on Grandpa and telling him he shouldn’t be doing that.

If I was faster and caught him before he started . . . but at this point I simply watch. He can’t get his hands any dirtier, and correcting him at this point will only humiliate him. In his right mind he knows you’re not supposed to splash around in the toilet. Apparently he thinks he is cleaning the toilet. I watch, and think how glad I am that the toilet water wasn’t well used. There are worse things, I tell myself, and it won’t do any good saying anything now.

I think Grandpa might have got an inkling that something wasn’t quite right with what he was doing because he stopped and through the toilet paper into the toilet and turned to the sink to wash his hands. At this point I tried to draw his attention to the soap but after running some water over his hands he lost interest and seemed to hunt around for a towel. I pointed out a towel and he half-heartedly wiped off his hands. I could tell he was getting increasingly confused . . . he was no far afield of his reason for entering the bathroom.

“You want to go pee?” I prompted.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’ve been wanting to go all this time.”

So he finally went . . . in the toilet, properly. I stepped away for a bit to allow him to finish up without feeling like someone was breathing down his neck. I come back a minute later and his has toilet paper on his hand and is scrubbing at the floor around the toilet. He ends up giving the exterior of the toilet and the floor around the toilet a cleaning before he is finally satisfied. We finally leave Grandma’s bathroom. Arlan has left the other bathroom and he stops in there to make sure things are all set to right, and perhaps to do some more cleaning there as well.

Once he is all finished with the bathroom he goes into the living room and sits down to watch TV. His top dentures are still in the kitchen sink, and his bottom dentures are still in his mouth. I get the dish from beside the sink and put his top dentures in. Then I go and ask him for the rest of his teeth, and set them all on the counter to soak for the night.

Such were this evening’s adventures, transcribed at 11:45 PM. I should have gone to bed two hours ago, but I wrote this instead.