The need for a cane, the need to wear diapers, the lack of ability to sign his own name . . . each milestone is marked as another march down the the one-way road. Today we marked another milestone. Today Grandpa pooped his pants.
Previously all his troubled has been with urinating . . . getting to the bathroom in time and getting his pee in the proper location. On the occasion of Grandpa’s accident today he didn’t have diarrhea–it was quite firm as usual (he almost never his a loose bowel movement. Since his defecation was as firm as usual I know it wasn’t just an issue of “I moved as fast as I could but didn’t make it.” No, this was the result of some type of confusion, a marker of how Grandpa’s confusion is increasing.
Since Grandpa didn’t explain I don’t know exactly how he ended up as he did. I don’t know if he was sitting on the couch and just had to go and it either didn’t occur to him that he needed to go into the bathroom before he let loose, or else he could have thought he was in the bathroom. Or, equally possible, he could have gone into the bathroom and pulled down his pants but failed to pull down his diaper and so sat on the toilet with the diaper still on and loaded the diaper. I don’t know and it doesn’t really matter because in each case it still comes back to the fact that Grandpa couldn’t sort himself out enough to poop properly.
This doesn’t mean that he’ll poop in his diaper every time for now on. In fact, I expect he won’t do it again for awhile, and the problem will only slowly grow increasingly more regular until eventually not only will he not know when he has to go to the bathroom (poop or pee) but he won’t even know when he is wearing a soiled diaper. He is already shown himself mostly unable to tell if his diaper is wet. Whether it is because he wets himself while he is asleep at night, or from accidents trying to use the toilet at night, more often than not Grandpa’s diaper is dirty by morning. But he is never cognizant of this fact and when questioned will say his diaper doesn’t need changing (and not because he is trying to be deceptive because he will ask for a fresh diaper if in his opinion it needs changing). To avoid confrontation over whether his diaper is wet or not I try to wait for morning bathroom trip where I can more smoothly take his old diaper and give him a new one without having a confrontation where he says, “It isn’t dirty” and I say “It is to dirty.”
Generally Grandpa still takes enough trips to the bathroom that I can scope out his diaper relatively unobtrusively to see if it is clean. As he becomes less cognizant of bathroom needs his trip to the bathroom will decrease (and I think I’ve already noticed this during the night) and this will force me to be more . . . I guess we might say confrontational about his sanitary needs. I’m not sure how I’m going to introduce the idea of me wiping his behind. So far I’ve continued to let it slide, even though I’m pretty confident his often doesn’t do a sufficient job himself. My reasoning is that for thousands of years humanity hasn’t had proper toilet paper and either didn’t wipe well, or didn’t wipe at all, so I’m not going to get all over his case if he’s no longer living up to American standards. But obviously if he is going to start pooping in his diaper and getting it all over his backside he’ll have to be cleaned up properly. Now, that probably won’t be necessary for months, and maybe not for a year or more, and maybe by that time Grandpa will be so out of it that he won’t care. But I suspect it won’t be quite that easy. Grandpa still has a large amount of tension in his life over his modesty. I have to help him with his diapers most of the time. Most of the time now it has become so routine that I don’t think Grandpa really considers what is going on, but occasionally it is as if he remembers and he’ll try to pull down his t-shirt for modesty while I’m helping. And then today when Grandma was trying to help him use the bathroom I came up the stairs and Grandpa said to Grandma, “Quick! Somebody is coming! Close the door!”
So, Grandpa continues to have sensitivities about his modesty, and having your butt cleaned by someone else is an even greater invasion of personal space so I suspect he’s not going to be thrilled (at the very least) when I must take complete charge of his sanitary needs.
Fortunately, for me, having taken part in the diaper changing for seven of my younger siblings being very close and personal with someone else’s poop is an issue I’ve already had to face and deal with. It doesn’t make it pleasant, but at least I’ve already had the baptism of fire as far as it is concerned, and I know all the coping mechanisms. So I took it in stride when I asked Grandpa today (through the bathroom door) if he need any help and he said, “No, I don’t think so. But you can come on in,” and when I did I saw a scene that very much needed my assistance. It was a very good thing that I came in to check on him because if Grandma had laid her eyes on that sight she would have flipped out.
It was right after lunch and I had noticed when I helped Grandpa to the table for lunch I had noticed was seemed to be an odor of poop around him. I took note of it to be investigated the next time he was in the bathroom, so I was very surprised on entering the bathroom to see dark poop streaks on the inside of his diaper. Grandpa was standing there with the diaper around his knees trying to “clean up” and my first thought was that perhaps he had wiped his backside and then decided his diaper need a scrubbing as well and so had scrubbed his diaper with the already fouled paper.
Somewhere in the process of moving to intervene I noticed the turd sitting on the sink counter. Grandpa doesn’t believe in throwing anything into the toilet so when he pulled down his diaper and saw the poop there he decided to fix the problem by taking some toilet paper, roughly scooping it out of his diaper, and depositing the crudely wrapped bundle on the counter his next step was to attempt to scrub his diaper clean. He generally leaves the bathroom with whatever toilet paper he has used to clean things (both those which actually needed cleaning, and many things that didn’t) and tries to find a garbage can to deposit them into. Which is why I’m so glad I came into the bathroom instead of having Grandpa come out to the kitchen with turd in hand and ask Grandma (who was still eating lunch) where he should put it. That would have likely produced a cataclysmic reaction.
As it was, I had the opportunity to handle this in a calmer fashion. “Okay,” I said, taking stock of the situation. “It looks like you need a new diaper.”
“It isn’t that dirty,” Grandpa said, examining his diaper.
“No, I’ll get you a new one.”
I went to the bedroom and brought back a fresh diaper and then helped him out of the one he had one. In the process of the change over another small bit of poop fell out of the diaper onto the floor and Grandpa proceed to clean it up with some toilet paper. He then looked uncertain of what to do with the dirty toilet paper, and fearing he was about to mush it up in a tight ball in his hand I prompted, “Through it into the toilet. Through that into the toilet.”
Grandpa seemed doubtful, but complied. Fearing what he might decide to do with the turd on the counter I quickly picked it up and chucked it into the toilet as well. With all the foul stuff pretty well taken care of at that point, dressing went without trouble. I left Grandpa to wash his hands (and his face, and comb his hair) and went to finish my lunch.
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