We are going through a particularly taxing stretch with Anthony. Part of it is with him directly, and part of it involves him but is indirect.
The latter has to do with his daily service provider who, as I have mentioned before, is the only choice we have now because of Anthony's propensity to occasionally hurt people. Due, I suppose, to what appears to be a high rate of employee turnover (which I can't fault because it's not a job I would do myself), there are some aspects of the quality of attention given to Anthony that affect us here at home. One is that it is unusual to see him come home without a change of clothes due to wetting himself--sometimes twice in one day. It's quite rare for Anthony to wet himself here at home, and we have told the service provider what we do to get him to go to the bathroom, but we're to the point of giving up on hoping for a change.
The other issue affecting us is having some of Anthony's clothing not return home with him. Some of it is underwear; we have been baffled as to why we never seem to have underwear for him to wear and have to keep buying it. Worse than that was a coat he recently wore. We would have thought that there was a designated place for a person's coat to be hung upon arriving, but perhaps not because it didn't come back. We were grateful a couple of weeks later (after considerable badgering from us) that someone finally found it. As with many of his clothing items, we bought it at a thrift store, but I had felt lucky to find a coat there that I thought met Anthony's needs well and wasn't looking forward to trying to replace it (or spending more money to do so.)
The problems directly related to Anthony are even more difficult for us. I have written before that he takes pleasure in ripping things, and lately that has come around again to clothing, but now it's at night when he is in bed. He'll rip off his undershirt (from under his pajama top), undershorts, and pajama pants. Sometimes it's his pajama top as well, so there is almost always at least part of him bare. As it takes me a while to go to sleep, the ripping sound jolts me if I am not quite asleep, or wakes me up if I am; either way, I get up to attend to him. I had a couple of days recently where it was quite difficult to function at work due to being awakened by him in the middle of the night.
Anthony currently goes after his service provider hours with a terrific lady and her family because our work schedules are such that neither I nor my wife are available to watch him for another couple of hours. But I am suspecting that the length of time each day without being at home and a regular routine has something to do with his issues. As such, we are trying to shorten the time he is out, and we try to get him on the treadmill here at home to give him the sufficient exercise that he might not be getting otherwise.
I have also been wondering with the increasing severity of his problems if something were changing in his brain or if he were no longer responding to his current medication mix, and one or both of those appears to have been confirmed in the last few days with the report that he had a seizure at his service provider. It's been three-and-a-half years since the previous occurrence, and one of his medications was specifically designed to prevent them from happening. With this new development, we're going to try to schedule a visit to the neurologist as quickly as we can.
But I keep coming back to the idea that things would be better for him (and us) if we could keep him home. Of course, if that were easily done, I might not be writing this post at all.
