What's the world coming to...?

There is a 4 year old who lives two doors down from us who is just adorable. She has long hair and is always in a dress and always has her fingernails and toenails painted to match. She's very outgoing and always comes up to the door when she sees Mom or I on the porch. She is very bright and very articulate for a 4 year old. And she can be kind of demanding, at times. She demands to come in, she demands to see the dogs, she opens doors on her own and one day the neighbors came home to find her in their house and half way up the stairs!

We affectionately refer to her as the "spawn of satan".

Mom loves kids and animals. That said, I was afraid this kid would come up sometime when I'm not around and come in and accidentally let the dogs out. If the dogs got out, Mom would naturally try and chase addie down (to no avail, I'm sure) and get lost in the process. Not only that, the other day the little spawn came riding down the street on her tricycle with a kitten in her basket. Well, that was all Mom needed to run out the front door and coo all over her and that kitten. And pretty soon she was off and down the street with the kid and the kitten. I kept an eye on her to make sure she made it back home. So, I decided to let this kid in the house a couple of times. She is so demanding and overbearing, that even Mom noticed, and was alarmed by it. And that is exactly what I wanted to happen. I let her in and she ran through the house and wanted to see this and that and Mom watched her going 100 mph and when I made her leave, fianlly, she demanded to be able to stay. I don't think anyone has ever been stern with her, which is probably why she is like she is...so I mustard up the 'mean' look and told her, in no uncertain terms, that if she was ever going to come over here again, she was going to play by MY rules. She is never allowed to open any doors or gates without me being there, she had to LISTEN (we have to go over that one a lot--every time she's here), and no cussing. Yep, belive it or not, that is a biggie. She hasn't done any of it at my house, but I was talking to her Mom one day in their yard and she called her own Mom an MF...only she said the whole two words. Wow. And she'll flip people off. Mostly older kids. I don't let her see me laugh, but that is quite funny, to see that tiny, chubby middle finger pop up when some older kid tells her to go home. Suprisingly, she understood the rules at my house, but Mom has seen enough, I think. lol. When she sees her coming down the street on her tricycle, Mom will go in the house and close the door.

She did that very thing one day and I said, "Mom, what's the world coming to when we have to barricade our doors from a 4 year old?"

She laughed. And agreed.

A victim of Vioxx...?

My Mother tells anyone who will listen that my Dad, her husband, was a victim of Vioxx. It's not true, but I am personally to blame for her believing this. What my Dad was a victim of was mostly his own fault. He smoked for 60 + years and couldn't put them down. Not after his first heart attack, not after his second open-heart surgery, not after they told him it would kill him. When he died, his heart probably looked like a black jelly bean. What they told him was that his heart would never be able to survive any surgery, ever again. And here's what happened...

Two years before he died he developed an aortic aneurism. They couldn't operate then because his heart would never be able to come back from it. So, because of the pain it caused him, he started taking vicodin. Eventually, his surgeon called him in and told him about a new procedure that he would be a candidate for and it was successful. But he was addicted to the vicodin by then. The entire time he took it he had trouble with his bowel movements. He couldn't go. At one point it got so bad he tried to dig out his own stool with his fingers. It was awful. I told him the vicodin was doing that to him and he said he knew it and that he knew he should get off of them but at that point he couldn't. He had a family doctor at the time that just kept writing those scripts. He lost a ton of weight and couldn't eat. Finally, I made him go to the hospital. In hindsight, I probably shouldn't have. And if I knew then what I now know, I wouldn't have made him go. He would have died in his own bed within 24 to 48 hours. His bowel was impacted (I personally, am sure it was from the vicodin) and they told him then: Sugery, or wait it out (which meant certain death).  Long story, short...he opted for surgery, and lived about a week longer.

All of this was before Mom's diagnosis of Alzheimer's. A couple of months after he died, Mom was lamenting over what killed him and (stupid me) I told her I thought his Doctor over-prescribed the vocodin (and it was over prescribed, whether it killed him or not). I explained to her that it bound him up to the point that it caused the impaction. Well, she got things turned around and started seeing all of those commercialsabout getting on the lawsuit if you had a loved one who died from Vioxx...completely different drug! And that was all it took.

Every time she starts to talk about him now, it's always the same thing..."that damn vioxx killed him." She'll tell someone that he smoked non-filtered cigarettes for 40 years, before switching to filtered, but that ain't what killed him. It was that damn vioxx.

We had some friends over on Saturday afternoon and Mom was telling the story about how she and Dad met. Its a cool story and they enjoyed it. Then she said, "but he didn't live long after that...he was a victim of the Vioxx scandal." Now, there was a new one on me...now it was a scandal and he didn't seem to live much longer after they met. Later, when Mom wasn't around, my friend asked me, "So how old was your Dad when he died?"

I assured her that he did live longer than Mom made it sound.  They were married for just over 49 years. But I'm sure that to her, it wasn't long enough.

Leaving Mom alone...

     It never ceases to amaze me, the things Mom remembers. Oh, she still knows the basics...husband's name and the fact that he's no longer with us, that she has 6 kids and can remember all of their names, and that she has a bunch of grandkids (although she will ask how many anytime the subject comes up). If I mention a grandchild's name, she knows exactly who I'm talking about, but if I show her a picture of one of them she may or may not be able to tell me which one it is. She tends to recognize the older ones easier than the younger ones, which makes sense. Other than that, her memory is pretty well limited to things that happened 50 years ago. However I've noticed that she will most likely remember the stuff that stresses her out...

Saturday morning I was doing laundry and she wanted to help me fold clothes. So we dumped them all out on her bed and proceeded to fold them. I took all of ours upstairs and she put her stack away in the drawers and closet. While we were folding clothes I told her that Stan and I were going to go to the track and watch qualifications that afternoon.  I'd never been to THE track in May, so we were going with some friends. In the next 3 or 4 hours before we left, she asked us 100 times about when we were leaving, when we'd be back, how long would we be gone, etc. She doesn't need 24/7 care, but we also don't usually leave her alone for more than a couple of hours at a time. And the neighbors were going to be home all day. I had talked to them the day before and they said they'd be around and check on her. And the 100 questions was the reason I didn't tell her sooner we were going to be gone. I knew the questions would come.

They started during breakfast. "How long are you going to be gone, today?" "What if someone calls?" When are you leaving?" What time will you be back?" What should I do while you're gone?" "What do I do if that little girl comes over?" (4 year old down the street). There were really only about 6 or 7 questions but she asked each of them about 5 times. I realized that she was a nervous wreck about being alone but she thought we were going to be gone all day.  I realized then that we should have just told her we were running errands. She's always ok with that.

So, we were all sitting on the porch, waiting for our friends to show up and she started a new line of questioning.  "When am I going to Mike and Sue's?" (she stays with them half the year).

I said, "Why, are you ready to go to Mike and Sue's?"

"No. Not necessarily, I just wondered. Someone said they were coming up to get me later. I just thought it was today."

My brother and I hadn't nailed down any plans for the switch yet, so I told her, "Mom, you're probably going to be here for at least 6 more weeks, maybe two months. Is that ok?"  She assured me that it was.

Then she said, "then why did someone have all my clothes out on my bed this morning? Like I was going somewhere?"

I reminded her then, "Mom, you and I were just folding the clothes on your bed, remember?"  And then I asked her, "you didn't pack your bags, did you?"

"Nope. Don't know where they are."

We went to the track and walked around a little while and took in all of the sights and sounds and smells that are the epitome of the Indianapolis 500 track during the month of May. I picked up a stuffed bear for Mom for Mother's Day (which she loved). And we were back by 4 pm. She was fine. The neighbors stopped over for a little bit to talk with her and she worked on her puzzle and kept the dogs company, which is her favorite thing to do, anyway.

Mom's from the planet Ewe Tic Ah

My Mother's memories consist mostly of things that happened 40+ years ago. Rarely does she talk about something that happened in the past 20 years. And actually, if she tells any story that doesn't involve her childhood, I tend to listen a little more carefully. She has a few more recent memories that she'll tell quite often, but for the most part they all involve "back home".  When she uses the words 'back home', or refers to her home in any way, she is not talking about her home that we moved her out of. She isn't talking about any home she ever shared with my Dad through the almost 50 years they were married. She is referrring to her childhood home. It's not that she doesn't remember Dad, her husband. She does, and will talk about him frequently. She just doesn't seem to remember much about where they lived. She'll see something in my house that came from her house and automatically say, "oh, that was gramma's." And I always let it go.

She'll talk about her hometown like it's another planet. Her grandmother raised her in a small town in Ohio called Utica. These days, when she brings it up, which is daily, she'll say it in such a way that she makes it SOUND like another planet. She'll say it like it's six different words. Ewe Tic Ah, Oh High Oh. I don't know where she picked up that habit, but it's getting a little weird. And everything in Ewe Tic Ah is still the way it was 60 years ago. She's sure of it. (actually, she may be right about that one--it IS a small town). But she really hasn't been there in years. Whenever she sees anything out of her ordinary, she'll comment that they don't have such things where she's from. It could be a city bus, or we could be at the nursery looking at plants. If she sees something that she isn't familiar with, its always the same thing. "We don't have anything like that where I'm from."  She get so upset when she reads something in the paper about a rape or murder...and then she's right...they really didn't have anything like that where she's from.

Beam me up, Scotty.

A Family Loss

When my nephew called to tell his Grandmother she was getting a new Great grandchild, she started a baby blanket. She's been making squares to join together. And because she's making the blanket, she's able to remember that there is a new baby on the way and most of the time remembered it was Richard's. But some of the time she had to ask who it was having a baby. 

Yesterday I got an e-mail from my brother saying that my nephew's girlfriend lost the baby. She's ok, but they are both heart broken, I'm sure. I had to tell Mom and she was also heart broken. She worried about Richard all day and even told Stan about it when he got home from work. It also got her to thinking about the ones she lost. She'd lost three out of her 9 pregnancies. She talked about them off and on all that day and said she often wondered what they would have looked like or been like. This is one of those memories that she never brings up. When she talked about that I hung on every word.

All help appreciated!

Every morning I walk out to the pond with my coffee and say the Serenity prayer and ask God to help me to make the right decisions where Mom is concerned and then I ask Dad if he's around, to help me out, too. All help appreciated.

We took Mom to a fish fry tonight. They have a big one every Friday close by us and they have live music and have about 100 picnic tables. They pack 'em in every Friday.  The music is usually easy-listening. Mom really enjoyed it. She was toe-tapping and singing through dinner. Then we went to Pottery Barn and looked around.  When we're out she'll pick up the oddest things she wants to buy. If you've never been in a Pottery Barn, they have everything that the country of Taiwan has ever made. And of all of the things she saw, the thing she wanted to buy was a broken bowl...she liked it. I managed to convince her it wasn't all there, the lid was gone. 

I know I said I hate to shop but we try and make a trip to the Pottery Barn about once a year. It's actually Stan's favorite store, next to Home Depot.

We came back home and sat next to the pond for a while. I told Mom the pond was her Mother's Day present. I said, "Mom, you can just have that for Mother's Day." Pretty chintzy, huh? But she loved that I gave it to her and she said, "that's the sweetest gesture."  OK--I did get her a card and a book, too. She can't retain anything much that she reads anymore, but she does still read and she'll read every night before she goes to bed. It puts her to sleep. And I got her an easy read.

Every night, before she goes off to bed she gives us both kisses and always says the same thing: "Thank you for another wonderful day." She says it whether we've been running all day or sitting around the house all day, matters not to her.

I thank her back.

It ain't always easy

After having such a good day at the zoo the other day, we kind of had a crash and burn the day after. Mom can be so funny at times and at times I want to lock myself in my room. It rained most of the day on Wednesday and we couldn't get out in the yard. Moms shoulder started bothering her. Her left shoulder had bothered her for a long time and I finally called the orthopedic surgeon who had done my shoulder surgery and he gave her a shot of cortisone and she hasn't said anything about it since. All of the sudden now it's her right shoulder and she's acting like I'm personally to blame. She'll reach for something and tweak it and boy, it's like someone is cutting her arm off with a dull blade. She'll writh around in pain for a few minutes and I'll get her to sit down and give her an advil. Then she looks at me like I'm not doing enough. She has no recollection of ever seeing a doctor and I'm thinking that she thinks she's had this same pain for months.  I think she wants me to call 911. Seriously. So the other day we went through all of this and she says, "I need to see a doctor when I get to Sue's."

Sue is my sister-in-law and that is where Mom spends half the year, at a few month intervals. Sue and I are at completely different ends of the spectrum in terms of personality. She loves to shop and I'd rather eat a bug than go shopping. She's bubbling over with enthusiasm all the time...she's great with Mom and Mom loves her. Mom loves me, too, but I'm more on the laid-back side. If I have to go shopping I'd rather go straight in, pick it up, and straight back out. And I really try and get it done without taking Mom. Sue tends to take Mom along more often than I do.  I (or we) do try and get her out of the house 2 or 3 times a week, though. But rarely for shopping. lol. If you've read my earlier posts, I also took her to a new MD about a month ago, or so, and it was a total disaster.

So, when she said she needed to see a doc when she got to Sue's, I said, "why do you need to wait until you get to Sue's?"

"Because I don't want to bother you." She didn't just SAY it, she was kind of snippy about it.

So I said, "What makes you think you're bothering me, but you're not bothering Sue? I don't think that was very nice and I'm offended." This is where my emotion took control over my common sense. For a moment I thought she was my old Mom. For a moment I thought she spoke with malice on purpose and I forgot that it was the AD. And for a moment I was snippy right back.

She said, "well, I'm in so much pain I don't know what I'm even saying."

I went to my room for about an hour just to get away. And really I didn't want to get away from her but from myself. I was so mad at myself for snapping.  One thing about it...I'm still beating myself up for being hateful to her and she'd forgotten all about it 10 minutes after it happened.

 

My husband

Sometimes I think I'm married to the greatest guy in the whole world. I guess all women think that once in a while about their husbands, but mine amazes me sometimes. His own Mother died when she was only 39 and he was 20. She had lung cancer. He was really close to her, too and I always wish I'd known her. We have one picture of her displayed on our bookshelf and she was a beautiful woman back in the day. She looked like a movie star.  She had four boys and my husband was the oldest. And when she died the youngest was only 5 or 6. I'm sure that the hardest part of her disease was knowing she was leaving her young children. That had to be awful for her.

Fast forward 35 years...

When we decided as a family to move our Mother out of her house, we weren't sure at the time where she would live. We tried to have her visit each of our homes for a month or two at least while we tried to figure out a permanent solution. I know that at least two of us (if not more) didn't really like the idea of her going through the change of enviroment every couple of months and a disruption of her routine. At the time, Stan and I had only been living together for about 5 years, but we had had Mom here with us several times over those 5 years. Whenever she left here, Stan would say how much he missed her being here. I have to say that I was a hold-out. I really didn't want her here all of the time. I kept thinking how there was 6 of us, why does it have to be me? But any time I brought the subject up with Stan his answer was always the same. He didn't have much to say on the subject except this: " I don't understand why it's such a hard decision. All I know is, if it were MY Mom, I know where she'd be." He didn't just say that to me once...it was every time the subject was broached.

So now, we share the responsibilty of her care with my brother and his wife. His wife seems to be of the same opinion as my husband. She seems to love having Mom there, and as a matter of fact, we have decided that the inlaws in general have dealt a lot better with this disaese than her own children have. I find that both funny and wierd at the same time.  Maybe we just all married well. Maybe we all married people better than ourselves, I don't know.  But our final solution gives us the breaks my brother and I both need and it isn't too much of a change for Mom, really. Except that their house is about 10 times bigger than ours and I kept thinking that we couldn't have her here because our house is so small. That was stupid...how much room does one little old lady take up at once, anyway? The answer is almost none.

A trip to the zoo

Mom and I went to the zoo yesterday. We took my friend's 5 year old and our step-daughter-in-law went with her two year old.  Mom has been wanting to see the new baby elephant we have and just last month a new giraffe was born so we got to see that, too. She was so excited to go and she got ready in record time. She wore jeans, a turtle neck and a denim shirt over that. Before we left I had to hide her winter coat and hats. (She had them laid out like she was going to wear them). It was 88 yesterday at the zoo. As much as she loved it, she accused me of trying to kill her between animal displays. She shed the denim shirt right away and she sweat like crazy the rest of the day. At one point she just went on strike. We were headed to the dolphin show and she just plopped down on a bench on the way there and said, "I'm sitting here!" And boy, did she look mad for a minute. She did that several times throughout the day and our zoo is really not very big. But the animals were a big hit. She loved the elephants and assured everyone that they didn't have elephants where she was from. We took the kids to the petting zoo and she marveled that she had never been in a zoo where there were chickens. lol. Instead of explaining to her that we were in the petting zoo part of the zoo, I just said, "Only in Indiana." And she laughed and laughed at that.

She loved the dolphin show and all the rest. We were getting ready to leave and Dalton, the 5 year old, wanted to see the snakes. On the way thre, Mom plopped down on a bench and said she was done. Emily and I decided to leave her on that bench and go in the snake display with the kids...we figured she was too worn out to go anywhere. But the longer we were separated from her the more worried I got. I kept thinking I could see the news headlines the next day in the paper..."Alzheimer's patient lost. Woman leaves elderly Mother alone on park bench." Emily just laughed at me and reminded me how worn out she was, but it didn't help and I was a nervous wreck. We were probably only separated for 10 minutes and by the time we left the snakes, I was practically running back to the bench. Of course, there she was, right where we left her and she got a good rest but she was ready to go home!

The Serenity Pond

The pond was finished the same day a woman, who I know only as "Serenity", lost her Mother to Alzheimer's. I couldn't shake the name, 'serenity', whenever I was around the pond. I kept thinking, even though I've never really named any of my previous landscape projects, that it was a perfect name for this one. But I didn't christen it or anything...just thought about it.

One afternoon, a day or two after it was done I was placing another rock near the water and one of the dogs chased a squirrel across the yard and up the tree that grows right behind the pond. He sat there on the lowest limb, just out of reach of the dogs, and watched me. The dog sat beside St. Francis and a sparrow lit on the rock and was drinking from the fall. And the fish had come up to me when I placed the rock, thinking I had food for them. So, for about 5 seconds, right here in the city I had birds, fish, squirrels, and the dogs all within an arms length, or two.  Mom missed it but later that afternoon we were sitting by the pond and I said, "isn't it great, Mom, just to sit here and listen to the waterfall?"

She said one word.............

 

 

"Serenity."

...more pond.

We worked all weekend and for the most part, the pond was finished on Sunday, April 22, 2007. I've added a few plants and re-arranged a few rocks and it will always be a work in progress, I'm sure. But for the most part, it was done that Sunday.

I thought about a lot of things while I worked on it. I wanted it to be a peaceful sanctuary in the middle of this otherwise crazy neighborhood we live in. I wanted the birds to enjoy it, the dogs to drink from it, and the fish to thrive. I wanted to see what little wildlife we do have here in the city to be drawn to it. I thought about all of the people I'd met recently on the message boards and hoped they all had as peaceful a place to sit and meditate, or pray. Because it was a peaceful place even before it was done. Every morning I was drawn to it...I knew what I wanted it to look like and I wouldn't really rest until it looked just like the vision. I thought about the people who were in the middle of their final days on this earth, having battled Alzheimer's and were fighting a losing battle, and I wanted it to be for them, in honor of them and the people who took care of them. And of course, I wanted it to be for Mom. I knew once it was done she would sit in front of it and love it (and she does).

 

I'm laid -off right now, so it was easy for me to get most of the work done on my new project (when the weather permitted) by myself. And as well as Stan and I work together on the home projects, I really had a vision of what I wanted this pond to look like and I found the whole building process very therapeutic, working alone on it. Mom would wonder out periodically and check on me or sit and watch for a while.

But on Saturday and Sunday Stan was home to help me. We got the liner in and the rocks placed about. We filled it with water and added the plants from the old pond. Stan, bless his heart, worked on the plumbing end. every time he placed a rock, I inevitably would move it to a location I preferred over the one he chose...poor guy. He had no clue what kind of mission I was on. I felt driven on this project to the extent that I wasn't even sure what kind of mission it was. lol....

 

I dug a hole

....I was so mad, I started digging. I had wanted water feature in my yard and we had a small one by the house but I wanted to make it bigger. I just hadn't started it yet. When that doctor made me mad I went home and dug up the old small pond and started moving all the rock to the corner of the yard where the new one would be.  And I started digging...and digging...and digging. I couldn't let go of the anger any other way. At least any other way that was legal or non-violent.  And pretty soon the anger did go away. The more I dug, the more it looked like it was going to be a beautiful pond and I kept digging and chopping up tree roots and before long I had quite a hole.

Mom would come out to check on me...she asked me if I needed anything and I asked her for a glass of iced tea, knowing that I may or may not see her agin with it. To my suprise, she brought it right back out. I know that it took all of the concentration she could muster to go all the way back into the house and fill a glass with ice and tea and then remember it was for me and bring it back out. When she did, all of the rest of the anger that I felt for this guy who tried to purposely hurt my Mom subsided and I was standing in a hole that would be our beautiful pond. Mom asked me several times that day what the hole was for and why was I digging. I answered her every time like it was the first. I was happy with it and I climbed outside of it and stood and stared at the hole for what seemed like forever. When I finally looked over at Mom she was looking at me, staring into that empty hole and I said, "you probably think I'm nuts, staring into this empty hole...but when I look at it, it's full of fish and plants and water. And it's done!" And she just laughed and gave me a big hug that told me that she knew exactly what I meant.

Doctor Bruce Bender...I thought Bender was his name, not his state of being...

We love Mom's doctor...the one who diagnosed the Alzheimer's. The one who treats her and us like we matter. The one who is 'up' on all of the current meds for the disease. The one who will talk to us separately, so as not to upset Mom when we talk about the dementia and what it's doing to her. New symptoms to discuss, new questions answered, etc. That doctor, however, is 5 hours away. And I'm finding out that finding one closer is no easy task. My first step was to take her to my doc. I'd never even met him because I always see his NP, whom I do like. When I spoke to her about Mom, she told me to have him see her first, that he was 'good with old people'.

Long story, short...I called the morning of her first appointment with him to see if her records had made it yet. "No records yet," his nurse told me on the phone. So, I very carefully asked her to ask him not to mention dementia or Alzheimer's, as all this does is upset her. His nurse was extremely agitated by my request. I should have cancelled right then and there, but I thought it'd be ok...that maybe SHE had never heard of being tactful around an AD patient about their disease, but that he would have more sense than her....Boy, was I sooooooooo wrong!!

I don't know what she thought I was really asking, or how she conveyed the message to him, but he came in the exam room, introduced himself, and proceeded to ask her about her dementia. He also had an attitude with me from the start and when the exam was over and I stepped out of the room to talk to him, he met me with disgust...as if I'd asked him to euthanize her or something. All I asked was to not mention the "D" word, and that I wanted her to feel comfortable here and to WANT to come back, because she wouldn't go see the last doc who told her it was what she had. He just shook his head, had a "whatever" attitude, and said, "sorry," and walked away from me. I don't understand how people like him can actually practice medicine. The number one drug prescribed in America today for AD is Aricept. This doctor couldn't even pronounce it.  Another red flag!

Anyway, when I got home from that doctor's visit, I was mad. It was Lent and I had been trying my darnedest to love everybody. I was almost through it, too. It's hard to love everybody, all of the time, believe me. But I had been doing a pretty fair job, not getting too upset at anybody or anything, and trying to just...LOVE. It felt pretty good, too. But the afternoon of that appointment, I wanted to take that guys stethoscope and wrap it around his neck until his eyes popped out. Yep...there goes the love...right out the window. All it took was one jerk who thinks he's a doctor.