Grandpa has suffered from back pain most if not all of his life. As best I understand it, he has a congenital back problem which I think Dad has inherited to some degree. As is the nature of such afflictions, what bothered Grandpa some earlier in his life has now become a much greater problem as his health declines.
Quite often Grandpa suffers from back and hip pain that, along with generally being in pain, makes it exceptionally painful to lift his legs as to get into bed or put on pants. He has increasing difficulty walking and while I don’t think it is all caused by his back problems I have noticed that when he is suffering from worse back pain his walking ability goes down respectively.
Over the past week he has suffered some particularly bad spells. I don’t know if this is simply some happenstance, or if he did something to cause his recent trouble. In his times of agitation or confusion he has a tendency to try to move things that it really isn’t a good idea for an old man to be moving. He very commonly exacerbates his pain with exhaustion and excessive moving about. If he has a bad day when he is really agitated and can’t stop moving about the house by the end of the day he is just about unable to stay upright on his feet and will be clutching at his back and complaining about how he has such a bad backache he is just about out of his mind.
This is all just part of the continual worsening that will eventually end up with Grandpa no longer being able to walk. He has complained to me often about the pain in his hips, especially when I am helping him put on his diaper or pants, but recently he had begun making more comments about his increasingly difficulty walking. He has made comments like, “People tell me to pick up my legs but if I could I would,” and complains that he can’t get his legs to work properly.
Last night he had a particularly bad incident. He went to bed with a backache but when he woke up in the middle of the night needing to go take a leak it must have been worse. He managed to get out of bed but he was so weak and trembling and unable to move his feet forward that he basically couldn’t go nowhere. He obviously had to go to the bathroom bad, and just as obviously couldn’t make it, no chance in the world. He made a lunge-grab for the commode and me, having turned the light beside my bed on and becoming cognizant of Grandpa’s desperate need and wavering unsteady condition, scrambled to help.
I helped him remove the bucket from the commode and hold it close for his business (though somehow he still managed to get some on the carpet) then I put the commode back together and got him back into bed. I cleaned up the mess and went back to bed.
Grandpa got up several more times in the night to go to the bathroom but apparently the pain in his back had subsided, because he made it to the bathroom without exceptional difficulty. Which is not to say he used the bathroom entirely properly every time, but that is a different issue.
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