Making Progress?

Kate was getting up on her own about 11:45 yesterday when I saw her on the video cam. I went to the bedroom and asked her how she was feeling. She looked puzzled and said, “Why do you ask?” I don’t think she thought she was sick. In fact, over the past nine days she has only recognized that she coughed and had to blow her nose and that, of course, only in the moment they happened. I had told her she had a cold, but she never remembered it. Day before yesterday, she definitely felt sick. That was when I heard her wheezing. I don’t believe she has had a conception of her being sick over a few days.

The good news is that I listened for her wheezing and didn’t hear anything. Then I asked her to take a deep breath and blow out through her mouth. She did that a couple of times. I still did not hear a wheeze. That made me feel a lot better. I didn’t want to see this advance to pneumonia. Of course, both of us have had the pneumonia shots, but we all know they don’t always work the way they are supposed to. Like many others, we had a light case of the flu last year even though we had the flu shot.

In addition to not wheezing, it was a good while before she coughed after getting up. Excluding her Alzheimer’s symptoms, she also seemed more normal. When I walked in she said, “Are you my daddy?” When I told her I was her husband, she couldn’t believe it. I decided it was best not to go into an explanation and suggested she take a shower. She asked where the bathroom was, and I took her. She took a long shower, dried off, and got back in bed.

After I got her up and helped her dress, she seemed fine. She wasn’t coughing. I decided to go out to lunch When I backed he car out of the garage, she coughed several times. Then I had doubts about going out. When she stopped, I decided to go ahead. Except for a couple of briefs coughs, she was fine at lunch.

Several times she asked where we were. Of course, she has been doing that for a long time. Now there is a new twist. When I tell her we are in Knoxville, Tennessee, she often asks, “What is Knoxville?” Then I explain that it is a city and that Tennessee is the state. It is only in the past few months that she has commonly asked this. It is another sign of the subtle changes that are constantly taking place. Mixed with her questions about our location, she also thought at times we were in Fort Worth. I suspected this on the way to lunch. She commented on remembering many things she saw along the way.

We came back home after lunch. When I got out of the car, she asked if she could help bring things in. I am sure she thought we were traveling and needed to unload the car. I told her I could get everything. Let me digress a moment.

(This is something new that I have mentioned before. Over the course of her Alzheimer’s, she has rarely asked if she could help me. In the past few weeks, she has asked if she could help me fold and put up the laundry, unload the dishwasher, and now unload the car. I also mentioned in a previous post that the other night she asked if there were anything she could do to help me. In that case, she was worried that I was carrying a heavy load and wanted to ease my burden. These may seem like very little things, but they are totally different from the norm the past ten years or so. She was letting me do things even before her diagnosis.)

She said she was tired and wanted to rest but brushed her teeth first. After brushing, she walked back to me in the kitchen. I could tell by the look on her face that she wanted to know what she could do next. That is a very common thing for her to do. I gave her the iPad and said she could sit in the family room and work puzzles, and I would be there in a minute. I went back to my computer. When I had finished what I was doing, she was walking out of the family room to the back of the house. I don’t believe she even sat down to work her puzzles. Shortly, I went back to one of the guest rooms where she was resting on the bed. She has definitely been more tired since catching her cold.

About two hours later, she came into the kitchen with her iPad under her arm and stood beside me. She didn’t say anything. This, too, is a very common experience. I knew that meant she wanted to get out of the house. We went to Barnes & Noble. We had been there fifteen minutes when Kate looked up at me and said, “I forgot they had this here.” I said, “What do you mean?” She pointed to her iPad and the puzzle she was working. By now I shouldn’t be surprised that she doesn’t recognize her own iPad, but I am. This was one of those times. I wonder what could have made her think it belonged to Barnes & Noble. This is similar to what frequently happens in restaurants. As we are about to leave, she often asks if the cup or glass is hers or belongs to the restaurant. It always makes me think about how she perceives the world. I simply can’t imagine how confusing for her it must be not to know where she is, what is hers, where we are going, and what she is supposed to do. There is so much I don’t understand. No wonder she gets confused.

We had another beautiful end to our day. I had chosen a YouTube video of choral music. In its cycle from one video to the next, we landed on a series of videos by a church choir. I didn’t see any identifiers as to what church or where it is located. I will have to check today. I do know that Kate was taken with everything they sang, and almost all their music was unfamiliar to either of us. She didn’t want me to stop the videos to go to bed. Finally, I turned them off and help her get ready to bed. I had to assure her that this was not a live concert we were watching, and we could pick where we left off tonight.