Dementia

If you read any of my entries you know that I am dealing with the following constant problems:  A knee injury, a potential vascular issue, a sometimes demanding job that I am apathetic about, questions about meaning and purpose in my life, a problem of overthinking and trying to get my inside voice to shut the hell up sometimes and give me peace, issues with my mom and deadbeat older brother, issues with my own mental health.

There’s another issue I haven’t yet gone into.  Let it be known that my wife’s parents are 95 and 79 respectively.  The 95 year old is, amazingly, the one who is doing better.  He’s old as dirt but mostly has his wits about him.  She, on the other hand, is in the second stage of Alzheimer’s.  This is the stage where you are more than a little forgetful — you start to have difficulty engaging in conversations, following flow, understanding social cues, jokes, that kind of thing.

Yesterday my wife went over to visit them during her lunch break at work and when she got there her mom didn’t know who she was.

So Jennie called me and cried.  How is this happening so fast? she said over and over.  My mom was sort of OK last week, forgetful but functional.  My Dad is scared, she doesn’t know who he is either.

I told her to stay with her mom, call her older brother and tell him immediately what’s going on.  He said get her to the doctor and somehow she got an emergency visit there with their PCP and the doctor decided that maybe the old lady had a urinary tract infection so they did a quick test and lo and behold:  Positive.  According to the doctor, and the internet, UTIs can make people confused and this condition is more common when someone is elderly and even more common when it’s elderly plus dementia.

I drove over at four thirty when I was able to stop working, down a crowded route 9, west from Natick to Marlborough.  When I got there her mom was still confused.  I asked if she knew who I was.  Her eyes seemed to recognize me —  her body language seemed to say “I know you” — but her brain didn’t.  But she seemed more or less comfortable, which was the weird part about everything.  If you put me in a room with a bunch of strangers I would be scared, tense.  Her, on the other hand?  Jennie gave her a cup of tea and her mom held it while seated at the table and smiled at me.  It was the same smile I knew from the day I met her.

We stayed for another two hours and by the end of it she knew who everyone was, her memory had returned.  The antibiotics they gave her for the UTI were already working and her brain was clearing up.  We all breathed a huge sigh of relief because this means that she can probably continue to live there with her Dad for a while without too much home health care.

But Jennie constantly wonders when they will need to go to a home.  One of the things I think to myself that I can’t say is, well, if your 95 year old dad dies, she’ll have to go somewhere immediately.  There’s no way she can live by herself.  The two of them right now are both compromised but they sort of compensate for one another’s deficiencies and it helps them to muddle along.  And I don’t know if you know this Jennie, but 95 year old people, they don’t tend to live too long.

Sometimes I look at Jennie and I wonder if she will get dementia like her mother.

Christ I hope not.  At any rate, that’s a problem for Future Homer.