Morning update

At breakfast, H remembered nothing of our home visit. Also she is responding to the reality of her loss of independence with a conspiracy theory: she is a prisoner in a hospital where no one will help her get her memory back because they are conspiring to keep her from driving and to steal her money. I and Pam and nurses have told her otherwise but she wants a DOCTOR to tell her to her face that she can't drive etc, so I am requesting that this happen at the family meeting tomorrow. All this is disheartening, of course (I think she was better last week actually), but you hope it is temporary and once home, and in a home routine, that she will be able to slide into the program of what she needs to do to have the best shot at some recovery. I talked to a few with experiences with cases like this and most often very little memory returns, they say. We all want Harriet to be the exception. Unfortunately what she needs to do is rather against her natural inclination to keep on the move, multi tasking, and the rest. The only time I have seen her relax is on vacation ... a few days at the beach but especially a cross country camping trip we took, weeks there and back, and she was relaxed the while. She can be relaxed if out of the usual Pdx environment she has created for herself, and my job is to keep her out of it. I wish we were rich and could go to Europe for three months or something. I am trying hard to get her into thinking about an extended vacation after hospital discharge, or a honeymoon, or whatever works to keep her from worrying about art walls and church affairs and women's circles and all the other things that come to her naturally but which in these peculiar circumstances are destructive to her best interests, or so says the neuro doctors. It won't be easy. But what she is in three or four months apparently is what she is for life, so we only get one window of opportunity to get her better. 

I don't know what the hell I'd do if I became a villain in her conspiracy theory. I don't even want to think about it.