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Home from Edinburgh

We got back from Edinburgh Tuesday night, 6/1. We had a great trip. It was just what I had wanted it to be. Being with Kate 24 hours a day for 10 days gave me a better opportunity to see how she is doing. The only thing worth commenting on is that it reinforced my awareness that her short-term memory is poor. She often forgot things I would have told her only a few minutes earlier.

I continue to notice that she gets a lot of things wrong. For example, she told me a movie started at 6:00 last evening. We got there just before that time and discovered that it started at 5:30. Another example: we have tickets to a play at a local theater for tonight. She had it on her calendar for tomorrow night. These are mistakes that any of us might make; it is just that she makes them regularly. It means that you can never trust that what she says is correct.

One other thing to report is that I saw a movie on the return flight from Amsterdam entitled 1776 Stories of Me and My Wife. It is about a Sci-Fi writer whose wife has cancer. He decides to write one story a day for her as a way of boosting her spirits. His feeling for his wife hit so close to home that I was wiping tears from my eyes for the last 30-45 minutes of the movie.

I also had trouble sleeping one night in Edinburgh and found myself thinking about Kate’s AD and her impending decline.

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Difficulty with Medications and Losing Things

Yesterday morning as I was leaving for church, I noticed Kate sitting on the bed looking just a bit sad. I asked if she was all right. At first she said fine and then she said that she had had trouble putting her pills in the pillbox for the coming week. I know she was seeing that as another sign of her AD. This followed her losing some clippers in the yard. She went to Lowe’s on Saturday and bought several new clippers as well as several pairs of gloves.

Later in the day she mentioned that she had been unable to find her debit card which has been missing 2-3 weeks. We drove her car to lunch and looked around the front seats and found it. I said, “I know you feel better about not having to go to the bank and tell them you needed a replacement.” She said it was not that so much as the personal feeling of knowing she had lost it.

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Missing Hair Appointments and Other Things

This past Thursday, Kate had a bad day. I had realized it in the afternoon sometime when we spoke on the phone but didn’t know what was wrong. When I got home from seeing Dad, she was lying down on the bed with the TV on. She didn’t want to talk at first and I backed off. Ultimately, she, of her own volition, told me that she thought her hairdresser “knows.”

I seem to recall that she had missed an appointment on Tuesday and this was a rescheduled appointment on Thursday. Instead of seeming to be annoyed, they were very understanding and kind. When she left, they said something like, “We love you.” Over the past few years, they have become accustomed to her missing a fair number of appointments. She suspects that they are just now putting it together. She was down only that day and evening. She seemed fine the next day.

In the meantime, she continues to show signs of forgetfulness. This most commonly involves the misplacing of something – her phone or something else. I am facing this from 2 sides , Kate and Dad. He is regularly “losing” something at his nursing facility. Typically he can’t find his phone. That happened over the weekend, but he found it in his top drawer. Yesterday when I started to put his bridge in his mouth before dinner, it was missing. I decided the dentist had come by and taken it to make an adjustment since I had left a message for this yesterday morning. As it turned out, Doris, who washed Dad’s clothes yesterday, found his bridge in one of his pants pockets. On the way to dinner last night, Kate told me that was the good news. The bad news was that she can’t find it. She looked all over. This morning she called Doris who told her she was sitting in a chair in the bedroom when she had given her the bridge. Kate went to the chair and looked all around it and found it on the floor.

Just as typical are the issues with the computer. She can’t seem to understand and recall how she downloads books from the computer to her Nano. I feel confident other things are happening with the family album she is working on. It is bound to be taking her longer to complete it because of this.

We are having lunch together today and going out to a benefit tonight. I try to keep us as active as possible and we have been more active since the diagnosis. In the next 10 days or so before we leave for Scotland, we have several events. I like to think this is good for her.

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Cleaning and Organizing

This morning I noticed that Kate was up and could see through the sliding glass doors from my view in the kitchen that she was working on the top drawer of her end table. I went in to say hello since she is rarely up that early (about 7:15). She was cleaning out and organizing her top drawer. The only reason I point this out is that for several months she has been trying to put more order in her life. She has worked on cleaning out closets and drawers, etc. I suspect this is a reaction to her feeling of a loss of control over things. She missed a meeting yesterday morning with a PEO. Kate had written it down for today instead – something she has done frequently over the past few years.

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Everyday Life

Nothing too eventful has taken place since my last posting with respect to Kate’s AD. She did call me yesterday to tell me that she had missed another hair appointment. This has occurred a number of times over the years even as recently as a few weeks ago. She gave me the time of the new appointment and asked me to keep tabs on her hair appointments. She will, of course, do so herself, but I will be her backup in the same way that I am for her medicine.

As we were headed to dinner last night, she told me that she had encountered a problem on her Facebook page. When I tried to explain what might have happened she got frustrated and said she wouldn’t understand it anyway. I understand, but at each moment when she brings up something like this, I forget and proceed with an answer that she can’t understand. I trust I will get better with time.

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A Phone Call for Comfort

Just got a call from Kate. I had missed a call from her about 30 minutes ago. I sent her a text and asked if she were all right. Thus her call. I asked where she is, and she said she was headed back home. Then she asked where I was and what I was doing for lunch. I told her I was lunching with her. She asked where she could meet me. I said, “How about Casa Bella?” She said, “That would be great.” I asked her to stop by the office and we could go together.

She was obviously distressed. I fear that she either got lost on the way to the meeting or she did something embarrassing at the meeting.

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Forgetfulness

Last night Kate and I went to a movie at our local arts theater, Olympia. When we got home she started to put Dad’s clothes in the washer. Then she discovered that the washer had clothes in it. She had turned the washer off when we left for the movie. I saw her do it but thought she was setting the washer for washing Dad’s clothes upon our return. She couldn’t imagine why she had turned the washer off. She said, “I don’t know what’s happening to me.” This is another indication that she is getting back to looking at life normally and not thinking about AD all the time.

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Not Much to Report

Not a lot to report today. For the most part the days since my last entry have not been too eventful. The one thing I would say is that Kate is feeling frustrated more easily and, I think, less patient with herself. The biggest source of frustration right now is the family photo album that she is working on with her brother. I know she is working more slowly than he would like. He has indicated in several communications that he wants to wrap things up. She feels that the album needs more work and that there is information not currently included that should be there.

She continues to be forgetful. The Aricept has certainly not changed that (nor is it supposed to). In a brief conversation we had at Chalupas over the weekend, she indicated that she thought she had deteriorated since January 21 when Dr. Reasoner first told her the results of the PET scan. I told her that I couldn’t see any sign of that and wouldn’t expect noticeable changes to occur in so short a time frame.

One example of her forgetfulness is that she wanted to get into her online bank account to pay a bill for some work on the flowerbed in the front yard. When I helped her, I discovered she had been using the wrong password. I offered to help her with making the online payment and she wanted to do it herself. I take this as a sign that she doesn’t want to give up all independence. She ultimately was able to do it, but it took a while to do so.