When dealing with an elderly person, one of the major issues is their sleeping at night, or more correctly, their inability to sleep at night.
One of the reasons could be a byproduct of an underlying medical condition.  In my father-in-law’s case his kidney dialysis caused his internal clocks to be run in opposite directions.  This caused problems in a few ways.

1)    He would get up in the middle of the night thinking it was time for dinner.
2)    Because he would fall back to sleep as dawn approached he would be very groggy when I had to awaken him for his dialysis appointments.  I had to take him three times a week for a 7:30 am treatment.  That meant I had to get him up at 6:00 am, walk him through the toileting and dressing routine and then try to get him to eat something which he did not want to do.  The elderly tend to eat very little and that makes the dialysis less effective.  A dialysis patient needs to maintain a certain level of protein and calcium.
3)    His getting up meant that we had to get up.  After taking care of him we would lie in bed thinking about everything and it would take an hour before we would fall back asleep.  Quality sleep was something we could only dream of.
4)    Because he was up at night he would sleep during the day.  This meant that we had to wake him from his nap to try and get him to exercise which made that routine all the harder to do.

Tomorrow I’ll share how we dealt with my father-in-law’s sleeplessness.