Not long after the escapes began, mom began to lose even more of her memories. These were things that she'd always known how to manage, like using the telephone or changing the channels with the remote on her TV. Some days when we'd arrive we would find her punching buttons on the remote (and messing up the cable settings to boot). If you asked her what she was doing, she'd say she was trying to call her sister, or her other daughter...or someone - but the phone didn't work anymore.
At first we thought maybe it was because she'd lost her glasses - well, at least we assumed she'd lost her glasses because we couldn't find them anywhere. This was the second pair to go missing since she entered the nursing home. At more than a few hundred dollars a pair, you simply couldn't keep replacing them. There's also a good chance that one of the other residents had her glasses, but we weren't allowed to go poking through other people's belongings. So in the end, we found some glasses at the drugstore that came pretty close to her own prescription. She could the read the numbers on her phone list, and the numbers on the remote, and see her TV programs, and since she really couldn't make much sense of the written words in a book anymore, it was enough. She could read the names on the phone list too - most likely because she recognized the names, and still knew all of us.
On one visit we found mom sitting on the window ledge in her room fiddling with her teeth (she had an upper plate) and complaining that they were bothering her. We found that odd, since mom had never really had any problems with her teeth before. We shrugged it off, and got her ready to go out.We were taking her out for lunch that day. At the restaurant mom ordered a bacon sandwich (she'd always loved crispy fried bacon on a toasted sandwich, and that was one thing that hadn't changed). When it arrived she didn't eat more than a couple of bites, and then proclaimed she wasn't hungry. She wrapped the balance of the sandwich in a napkin and shoved it into her purse (we had become accustomed to checking that purse every day when she wasn't looking in order to remove leftover food).
I took her into the bathroom at that point and insisted she leave her purse at the table where my daughter would watch it. She was resistant, but finally left it behind. When we came back to the table my daughter asked her where her "teeth" were. My mom opened her mouth and pointed to her plate. My daughter said "no gramma, your teeth are right here in your purse". She'd found my mom's teeth wrapped in kleenex in the bottom of mom's purse.
So. Just whose teeth were in mom's mouth? When we finally got her to take them out, the name inscribed on them was that of her room mate. No wonder they were bothering her. That was one of the things we laughed about for a long time afterwards.
Mom had an ongoing dispute with the room mate. They simply didn't get along. The room mate would take mom's things...a vase, or a ceramic figurine or one of mom's pictures. She'd take anything that wasn't nailed down. We'd taken to checking the room mate's side of the room as we came in to see mom. Apparently there was one day when they'd gotten into a "knock-down-drag-out" fight over some bit of frou-frou. Mom had some bruises and scratches, but she came out on top - the room mate had big egg on the back of her head and had to be watched for a day or two. The girls at the nursing home said the room mate had initiated the fight, and it wasn't the first time, but it was the first time that mom had fought back. I guess she'd had enough. Not long after that, they switched mom to another room with a woman who was seldom out of bed, and who was quiet almost all the time. They got along fine.