My Name Is Jackie Onassis

Mother's been a bit under the weather lately. They say that UTI's will mimic symptoms of dementia. She has one. And she's been mimicing those signs for a couple of weeks now, while being on the wrong med, then being allergic to another, so on and so on. Sometimes she just talks gibberish. And I then go about trying to figure out what she's saying, like I'm playing a game of charades. She knows what she wants to say, she just can't seem to say it. She can hear, very well, the words that are coming out of her mouth, she knows it's not what she'd intended, yet there's nothing she can do about it, it seems... but laugh at her own funny self. That's not crazy, that's a person with a sense of humor. Now, some days it's a different kind of not being able to speak. Sometimes she forms perfect sentences, which make perfect sense... it's just that they have nothing to do with what she was actually intending to talk about. "I hurt my leg", may turn into,"The arm on the chair broke." There are words to describe this sorts of language mishaps, I just can't remember what they are right now. You see, I have a bit of ADD/ADHD, and my memory isn't what it should be. There have been many funny moments (not nearly enough) since I became my mother's caregiver. And I hope to share them all. The latest was what brought about the title to this blog. I was trying to get her ready for an appointment, this morning, and she kept wanting to lop over on her right side, as she sometimes does when she's not at her best. I was fussing with her, about trying to stay sitting up, to try and stop falling over, when she said, rather boldly, "Who do you think you are?" Well, I looked at her, quite frankly, and said, "Who am I?" "Yes," she said. "Well," I replied, "Who are you?" Whereupon she most firmly stated, "I'm Millie Martin." Staring into her self-assured and matter of fact eyes, she then asked again, "Who are you?" "Me... I'm Jackie Onassis." She fell over laughing.