Last night we had dinner at Emilia. It was a nice evening. We had a good meal, and a man we know from church played the piano. The night before I had reviewed our itinerary and lodging for our trip to New Zealand in February. We both got excited about this trip. I finally decided to travel on our own and travel by car within the country. I think this will work out much better than having to meet a schedule for a group as we would have done with OAT.
The lost is found.
Kate found her driver’s license and ATM card this morning. I am sure she was relieved. I know that every time something like this happens, she suffers. After church today, we walked to our cars. She asked if I were taking her to my car first – that her car was in front of the church. I told her I thought I had seen her car in back near my car. She told me it must have been a similar car. When we got near the car, she still thought it belongs to someone else and started to walk away. I looked closer and saw that it was hers. She was surprised and hadn’t remembered parking in this spot at all.
As we drove away from the church, I noticed that she turned right instead of left. I followed her to see where she was going. The road took her back to the church parking lot. She then went the correct way home. When we got home, she looked at me without saying anything. I know she was saying without words, “I am getting worse. I am discouraged.” I gave her a hug. We embraced. Neither of us said anything; however, we each understood the other.
Driver’s License and ATM Card Again
I just got home from the hospital visiting Dad. The first thing Kate said was that she couldn’t find her driver’s license or ATM card. Of course, we may find them. She said, “I don’t know, Richard.” I took that as an expression of personal frustration over her decline. We’re going to have to figure out a way to keep them in a single location. I thought we had done that this time by putting them in the console of her car between the driver’s and passenger’s seat.
Lots of Caregiving
I am with Dad in the hospital. I received a call from Mountain Valley at 6:00 am Friday morning saying they had discovered rectal bleeding and recommended that he go to the hospital. This morning they performed an endoscopy and discovered that he has 3 ulcers in his upper intestine. That’s good news as it can be treated with Nexium which they are doing intravenously now. He’ll probably go back to Mountain Valley on Monday.
This is the second time in a week that we have taken him to the emergency room. It is on these occasions that one becomes keenly aware of the multitude of people Who are here on a daily basis. Yesterday as I took a break to call Larry, a woman in the parking lot called to me. She told me her daughter was very sick and needed a wheel chair. I went inside, got a wheel chair, went to her car and brought her in. I noticed the mother was struggling from some type of foot problem and suggested she might need a wheel chair as well. After leaving the daughter with an attendant at the check-in desk, I took another wheel chair out to the mother and brought her in.
Two friends from Littleton, CO, visited us for 2 nights this week. It was good to see them. Kate enjoyed their company and was unusually talkative. She gives a fair amount of misinformation, but it doesn’t usually matter as the listeners don’t know and won’t have occasion to discover the mistakes.
She continues to spend time in the yard which I have noted on several occasions is her therapy. The plants don’t complain or give suggestions and neither does anyone else. For me it does occasionally present a problem. That is usually when we are scheduled to go someplace, and she gets caught up in the yard rather than getting ready. That occurred this week as I was focusing on getting the house ready for guests. She had brought in cuttings from the yard and put them in a small vase around the sink in the laundry room. While it was a nice touch, she didn’t notice that there was dirt all around the sink. If I hadn’t specifically suggested cleaning the area, she would probably not have noticed.
Recently Kate has become more sensitive about being corrected. I am having to learn not to say anything that might make her feel bad. One of my bad habits is asking, “Do you remember . . .” Because there is less and less she does remember, this is not a good thing to say.
Another Small Sign of Things
Kate was with me when we met with Dad yesterday afternoon. She also knew I was out late at the hospital with him last night. This morning I spoke with her by phone before going out to see him. When I got back home, she had been working out in the yard. When she came in, she didn’t ask me about Dad at all. If it were not for her AD, she would have asked me right away about him. As it was, I simply told her. I am confident she would have asked at some point, but at that moment she had completely forgotten about him. I see this kind of thing all the time. While this incident has no negative consequences, there are times that it does because I will assume she has remembered something when it turns out she hasn’t.
Last week she missed a neighborhood association board meeting because she had forgotten. She hadn’t told me about it. That reminds me she hasn’t told me about her next hair appointment. She generally does this shortly after coming back from her previous appointment.
Dad and Delusions
Yesterday morning about 11:15 I got a call from Mountain Valley telling me that Dad had not slept all night, had been agitated all morning, and had fallen. I got out there by noon and was able to calm him down. When I arrived, he was trying to get in another resident’s room where he said there was some blue spaghetti. Kate was with me. We distracted him and took him to a private dining room where we were able to talk. We were able to carry on a conversation; however, he was talking about things that happened the night before. Those things had not really occurred. In addition, he was seeing people and things in the room with us. At the recommendation of the director of nursing, we took him to the hospital where we spent 6 hours in the ER. They could find nothing wrong except for his delusional behavior which continued the entire time. An ambulance to him back to Mountain Valley at 10:00 pm. I called the nurse on duty, Leslie, and told her he would need a sedative in order for him to get some sleep. They did so, and he slept all night. I went out to see him after leaving the Y this morning. They said they had been unable to get him up. I told them I wasn’t surprised and to let him sleep through the morning. They are going to try to give him some lunch. To the best of my knowledge he hasn’t eaten since Wednesday night when I was with him. I know he didn’t have lunch or dinner yesterday and was missing breakfast this morning.
The doctor’s diagnosis was simply that this is a part of the progression that dementia takes. I want to believe this and can accept it, but it came on so suddenly that it makes you wonder if something more specific occurred to bring it on. I do know that I see other residents on Dad’s hall that seem to have delusions, but they are at a more advanced stage of dementia than he is. I am anxious to see what he is like when he wakes up.
Two Examples
Each day brings numerous examples of AD. Here are two. Yesterday afternoon I arrived home from visiting Dad. When I came in I heard Kate on the phone. She had her computer in her lap. I thought she might be handling some details concerning our neighborhood directory for which we requested updates yesterday afternoon. I busied myself with a few things on my computer. When she hung up, I discovered that she had forgotten about a commitment she had made to prepare a flyer announcing an annual fundraiser for her PEO chapter and that she needed to have it. She ended up stressed, but together we got it done.
This morning she has her PEO meeting. I planed to drive her and told her we would leave around 9:30. Around 8:00 she was dressed in her yard clothes and said she was going out to take the yard trash to the curb for pick up this morning. At 8:45 after I had dressed for the day, she had not come inside to get ready. I went out to let her know it was time to come in. When she came in, she asked me if I could get the second wheelbarrow filled with trash and take it out. I hesitated and said I would have been happy to do it if she had asked me before I got dressed. Of course, I went out and emptied the wheel barrow on the curb. My point is that she loses track of time so quickly and then doesn’t do the things she originally started to do even though may have been the more important things she wanted to do.
Because of the flyer for PEO we had a late dinner – almost 9:00 at Hathaway’s. While there she commented that she is relying more on me for help than in the past. I told her I understood and recognized that I find myself trying to take more initiative to do so but that there are times when she wants to do things herself. She acknowledged the situation. We both then indicated that we thought each of us is handling things pretty well.
More Happy (many) and Sad (some) Moments
I find that my own mood which by nature is upbeat is heavily influenced by how my dad and Kate are doing. I have had a number of very good days with Dad since returning from Chautauqua. I continue to enjoy life to its fullest with Kate. On the other hand, I do notice things happening with her that make me sad. One thing that does both is her working in the yard. She loves to get out and prune and plant. She continues to buy new plants even though we are now approaching the end of the summer season. What makes me sad is that I believe she does this because it is the only thing that she is able to do without suffering any frustration. It seems like just about everything she tries to do on her own ends up with a problem of some sort. I must admit that I also have a tendency to get irritated when she neglects things that she might do in favor of working in the yard. Then I stop and realize why she is doing it and feel sad that she is left to this limited area of activity. Then I feel happy that she has something like gardening that I hope she will be able to do for a long time to come.
Yesterday afternoon I arrived home just as an upholsterer was about to load all the cushions from the patio furniture into his truck. I told him that he was supposed to be getting the cushions from the kitchen, not the patio furniture. Kate had pointed him to the patio cushions and forgot completely about the cushions in the kitchen’s bay window. Today when we went to a shop to order new cushions for the patio furniture. Our decorator asked if the upholsterer had come by. Kate told her that he hadn’t. I corrected her. In a few minutes she told me she was glad that I had come in at that time. She said she had already embarrassed herself by forgetting the upholsterer had come yesterday.
Another sad moment came the other night as we were driving somewhere to dinner. I asked her how she was, and she told me she felt “secure” when she was with me. This made me feel good that she knows she can depend on me; however, it made me feel sad that she is insecure in so many situations. She really wants to do things independently. In fact, she sometimes tells me that she can do something that I took the initiative of helping her with. As I indicated earlier, when she starts on something it becomes a problem for her. Here is one example. She wanted to do send an email to a friend from Denver who is coming to visit us next week. She could never get around to doing it. I ended up writing the email and sending it from Kate’s computer so that our friend would see it came from Kate and not me.
Short-term Memory Gone?
I am in our room at the hotel here at Chautauqua awaiting Kate’s return from downstairs. Several things have happened in the past few days that suggest her very, short-term memory is rapidly going. She went downstairs about 20-25 minutes ago to get a piece of carrot cake left over from our lunch at the Italian Fisherman this past Saturday. I suspect she ran into our friends from Houston and is engaging in conversation with them. This is not a problem except that I know that she wanted to buy some tights because of the cold weather yesterday. We planned to go directly from our hotel to the Refectory for iced tea to which she has become addicted in recent years. Then we were going to the farmer’s market for a muffin or other breakfast treat. In 30 minutes it will be time for the Jim Roselle’s radio show during which he interviews the speaker of the morning. These are all things she wants to do, but I am sure she has forgotten that.
Yesterday afternoon we stopped at several shops on the plaza. After coming out of one, she said she wanted to go in one more. Then we could go. I pointed out that she had already gone through that shop. She didn’t remember it at all and said she wanted to go through it again, and she did.
I am always facing the dilemma of how or whether to call her attention to such things. It is hard not to do so because we are so conditioned to say, “You’ve already been there” or whatever seems natural. On the other hand, I fear that each time something like this occurs it makes her feel bad, and I don’t want that. I am trying not to fret. I attempt (frequently not successfully) to take a breath before answering and think of the right thing to say or whether or not to say anything. Perhaps with experience, I will get better.
Another example occurred at dinner last night when she told our server something and only minutes later Kate told her the same thing.
Growing Weary?
We’ve had two really good days at Chautauqua, ones that remind us why we like coming here. I have the impression that Kate feels this even more than I. On the other hand, tonight I observed a behavior that I have seen before and that is a desire to simply relax and not attempt to do everything. That occurred this evening when we were at dinner here at the Kevin Hotel. She suggested that she thought I might be thinking the same thing that she was thinking. She didn’t say what it was, but I thought (correctly it turns out) that she did not want to go to the evening performance in the amphitheater but simply relax at the hotel. After dinner she asked if we couldn’t go out on the porch off our room and have a glass of wine. I said that would be fine, and I meant it. As it turns out, I had already decided that we would skip all or part of the evening performance. I thought that she did not know what the program was because we had not discussed it, but I now recall that our afternoon speaker, Justice Anthony Kennedy, had said that he was here for his granddaughter’ dance performance this evening. This notwithstanding I thought it was unusual that she just wanted to stay in tonight. This is something we have rarely done in all the previous times we have been here.
The reason I even mention it is that I observe that Kate more frequently wants to retreat from social engagement than in the past. Of course, this could be something else. On the other hand, when I observe things like this, I always think of the possibility that it is related to Alzheimer’s. Perhaps this is another good reason that I think she is correct in not wanting others to know of her diagnosis. If they knew, they might be looking at everything as a function of Alzheimer’s.
One thing I do know is that she has handled herself well socially. Tonight at dinner she was able to engage in conversation with those at the table with no difficulty at all. She was especially cordial to two Japanese guests that arrived today from Tokyo. We have also spent time with a couple from Tom. They have also introduced us to some of their friends, and Kate has handled the situations normally.
