Dear Pat,
Good to hear from you again. A couple of things that might help....
My mother had a urinary infection late last year and was given antibiotics too. These really seemed to aggravate her mood swings. They also caused her to become very weepy, depressed and snappy and also affected her appetite and sleep patterns during the course of the medication. Antibiotics are really harsh on the system, so I gave her multivitamins to attempt to alleviate some of the side effects.
You might like to have a look at the 'Payback Time Thread' which deals with constipation problems. Senna is pretty radical as a long term solution to constipation, so you might like to think about Lactulose and some of the other suggestions that have been posted.
'Personality changes' can be tough to deal with because of the irrationality involved. It's impossible to know why AD sufferers suddenly 'dislike' somebody for no apparent reason. One of the main things to keep in mind is that it is the Altzheimer's talking, not your mother. Keeping calm and trying distraction techniques may quite often work, unless she becomes too agitated. The best thing to do then is to just disappear for a while. My father is very prone to this sort of behaviour and I quite often have to vanish until he's forgotten why he was irritated.
Hope this helps a bit.
Jude
Good to hear from you again. A couple of things that might help....
My mother had a urinary infection late last year and was given antibiotics too. These really seemed to aggravate her mood swings. They also caused her to become very weepy, depressed and snappy and also affected her appetite and sleep patterns during the course of the medication. Antibiotics are really harsh on the system, so I gave her multivitamins to attempt to alleviate some of the side effects.
You might like to have a look at the 'Payback Time Thread' which deals with constipation problems. Senna is pretty radical as a long term solution to constipation, so you might like to think about Lactulose and some of the other suggestions that have been posted.
'Personality changes' can be tough to deal with because of the irrationality involved. It's impossible to know why AD sufferers suddenly 'dislike' somebody for no apparent reason. One of the main things to keep in mind is that it is the Altzheimer's talking, not your mother. Keeping calm and trying distraction techniques may quite often work, unless she becomes too agitated. The best thing to do then is to just disappear for a while. My father is very prone to this sort of behaviour and I quite often have to vanish until he's forgotten why he was irritated.
Hope this helps a bit.
Jude