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Frustrations at Chautauqua

We arrived back from Chautauqua late Saturday night after a great week. I do think it was a week of some frustrations for Kate and arousal of my concerns for her. She repeatedly misplaced things and forgot things. It makes me wonder what things will be like when we are here next year. I still want to be hopeful that we have a long time together before we enter the more serious stage of the disease, but I just don’t know. It will be interesting to see how we do in Africa the first two weeks of January.

The funny thing is that I had intended to write this note a couple of days ago and now find that I am unable to remember the specific instances of memory problems she encountered during the week. If I think of them later, I will come back.

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Continued Problems at home and on the Road

We are still at Chautauqua, and I sense this has been a tough week for Kate. She told me a couple of days ago that she is a basket case. After I gave her a second toothbrush yesterday (she failed to bring one with her, and I had given her an extra that I carry for that purpose), she also made a remark that a friend whose husband died of AD, told her it only gets worse.

She continues to work on fer family album, a project that should have been completed long ago. To her credit, she is also editing some of the work that her brother had done; however, I am confident that given her mental state, she is taking 3-4 times as long as she should to complete everything.

I have also noticed that she has seemed more needy in the sense of wanting to be close. We were to meet in the Amphitheater for the morning lecture yesterday. I never saw her come in, and she did not see me. When it was over, I waited for her to come out. When I didn’t see her I came back to our room. She finally arrived and was panicked because she had not been able to find me. I am thinking this is one of the early signs of fearing to be out of my sight.

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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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A Short Getaway to Asheville

We seem to be settling in a somewhat normal life after the rush of emotions and related conversation. I don’t mean to suggest that we won’t continue to have our ups and downs but to point out that the week has gone pretty well. I had a presentation near Asheville, so I took Kate with me. She shopped while I was doing my presentation. When I finished, we had dinner at a nice restaurant. It was a great meal. She had had lunch at a seafood restaurant where she enjoyed the scallops she loves so much. We came back to the hotel and got to bed early. We stayed once again at the Haywood Park Hotel where we have stayed the last 7 or 8 times we have been to Asheville.  We love it and think of it as our second home. In fact, Kate mentioned (in jest) that when she needs more care she wants us to move there because it is so nice.

The next day we took a walk in the downtown area near our hotel. Before returning to Nashville, we had lunch at a new place a friend had told us about. It was fantastic. We will return there.

Kate has gotten started in yoga this week. She is going this afternoon for the third time, I believe. She enjoys it, and it is something she should be able to do for a long time (a long time being undefined). I tend to think, but would not say to her, that she is farther along than we want to believe. I suspect we won’t be able to keep this secret for more than 2-3 years, perhaps less.