I have heard other people talk about Alzheimer’s patients and sundowning. I have wondered if that is something that Kate is likely to experience. Up until now I had not noticed any signs of what I believe to be sundowning. There have been several times recently when I have wondered. These instances occurred when we had planned to go someplace for the evening. When I mentioned that it was time for us to get ready, she has reacted very negatively. The times I remember involved going to a concert. One was the symphony. The other, I think, was a local choral group. This past Saturday it happened again. We have missed the last two symphony concerts. I was quite interested in the one this past Saturday because of the soloist (a former child prodigy who is now 33) who was playing the Mendelssohn violin concerto. The orchestra was playing the Tchaikovsky 5th Symphony. I thought this would be a concert that Kate might enjoy; so I made reservations to a luncheon with the soloist this past Friday. We went, and she enjoyed being there to meet her. We talked about Saturday’s concert. She was interested. I mentioned it to her several times on Saturday. Then about an hour before we were to leave I told her it was getting time for us to get ready. This made her very unhappy. In fact, she had gotten out of the bed and then got back in and pulled the covers over her. I tried not to force her to go but said, “”But you had told me you wanted to go. You enjoyed meeting the soloist at lunch yesterday.” I went on to tell her that she didn’t have to go, that I didn’t want her to be upset, that I would go on. After a few minutes, she decided to go with me. She ended up enjoying the concert and got to speak with a number of people we know. It was after this that I began to draw an association with sundowning. In the future I will be more careful to pay attention to her behavior around the end of the day.
The second thing that happened was yesterday. I had come home from church right after Sunday school as I have been doing for several months now. When we got home after lunch, Kate worked on her iPad. Then she lay down to rest. When she got up, I could tell that she was down. I decided to see if she would like to eat dinner a little early. She said she would. She was silent in the car going to the restaurant, and she wanted me to be quiet. As we were about to get out of the car, she said she was “down.” Then she went on to say, “I just can’t believe they would say that.” (I should also mention that in the past 24-48 hours she has mentioned something that indicated she thought I was checking with some friends in Nashville about something. I presumed this involved this same issue.) I asked her if she were talking about the same couple she has mentioned before. She nodded. She seemed seriously disturbed. When we had ordered, I reminded her of something I had said a week to ten days ago. I said that I really didn’t want her to have to struggle so because I believed she had had a dream about the whole thing and that I was unaware of our friends ever saying anything about her mother, certainly not to me. She appeared to accept it but with a little doubt.
This morning while we were at Panera she seemed in a good mood. At one point she volunteered that she had decided I was right, that she had just dreamed the whole thing (again without saying what the “whole thing” was) and that now she couldn’t even remember what they said. She told me she could remember my telling her it was a dream but not what they said. What I am hoping is that she will not call up her memory again so that we have to go through the same process again. She told me she felt better about our friends.
