<p>I can tell you that my MIL was a slow reacting, mild mannered person, one of the least reactive people I know up until about 5-6 years ago, when she would get upset and mean about any little thing. Often made no sense what outraged her so much, but in terms of other mentally capacities, there was no outward change visible to any of us. She then would throw things at us, usually napkins, crumbled up papers and and just be so angry. My DH would get furious with her. Since she’d had a hip replaced, both knees and was refusing to acknowledge her diminishment in hearing, plus we had to move here with us while she had her surgeries, we attributed her ill temper and mood to those things. Because she still could drive a car, and showed no loss in mental acuity at all. She was just turning mean is what she thought. </p>
<p>But when she was at the nursing home for rehab, one of the doctors there wanted her examined neurologically, as he found her failing in textbook ways in terms of her mental status. She was given a quick exam which she failed dismally, but we attributed it to her being out of her environment, the surgeries, the pain meds, other meds, anger over the surgery, rehab, nursing home, and the fact that she was always a bit off and quirky. I don’t know if she could count backwards by 7 in her prime. She could never remember where we lived (and neither can my mother, these Indian names don’t cut for the memory cells of some), and some of the questions made me pause too (yeah, maybe I AM going that way too, entirely possible), so we didn’t give it a whole lot of weight. When she grabbed me by the hair when I was just helping her put on her shoes, and would not let go, then denied she ever did such a thing, and when she slashed and clawed at some people, and at us with no good reason, no provocation, we had a full assessment done. She refused to cooperate, but by then it was pretty clear she was demented, had some mental illnesses in there too, like depression, paranoia and, yes, schizophrenia. She hears voices and talks to them all of the time now. She always talked to herself, often non stop–lived by herself and that’s just the way she was, but now she has voices talking back to her. It’s been very difficult for my husband to accept even now that his mother is mentally ill, and to use a term like demented or deranged to him would upset him greatly. I wouldn’ t trust her with a gun for a second. I have no idea at what point she became dangerous, however, as she did not have dangerous things easily within reach and she is very slow moving and wheelchair bound. My kitchen knives are now kept way up high in cabinets, don’t even remember making that transition, but yes, she could have been dangerous. At this point, she has almost no energy to even do what she has to do, but during a transition period, she was problematic.</p>
<p>Another major problem and source of the agitiation was morphine, in her case. Her pain killers were all morphine based, and she gets a psychoses and rage from any morphine type pill. With Reese, this could play into the situation, though FL is very strict, nigh impossible to get percocets, vicodein and the like for arthritis, recent laws have really tied the medical profession’s hands in prescribing these thing. So even as pain can cause rage, so can the solutions, and though not easily available legally in FL, getting them through other sources would be cheap and easy.</p>
<p>I’m blathering here, because the thought of someone who is not a hardcore criminal with a long record of these eruptions just blowing someone away under the circumstances, just blows me away. </p>