ENCORE #153! – After Alzheimer’s

Dad’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s stayed hidden from everyone until I took over the medical administration of my parents in 2015. Once I found out, there was a deafening silence from most of the people I know even though virtually all of them would add, “My _____ had Alzheimer’s…” But there was little help, little beyond people sadly shaking heads. Or horror stories. Lots of those. Even the ones who knew about the disease seemed to have received a gag order from some Central Alzheimer’s Command and did little more than mumble about the experience. Not one to shut up for any known reason, I started this part of my blog…This first appeared in July of 2019.

While my wife and I were celebrating our 32nd anniversary, I chanced to start thinking about how this was the first summer in…hmmm

How many years has it been since Mom and Dad’s lives collided with mine? Not that it was an accident; not that it wasn’t necessary; but once I became the neighborhood contact and helper for my parents, my life changed drastically. Spontaneity vanished. We couldn’t just “drive up North and go camping without making plans and preparing and notifying people.

Learning an entirely new vocabulary, I became a lay-expert on the disease, its symptoms, and its non-treatment. I added it to my breast cancer blog because the advent of the disease in my father and also my mother (who had, most likely, age-related dementia at the end) abruptly dominated my life as much as breast cancer had.

How many years?

We interred Dad’s remains this summer six weeks and two days ago (June 27, 2019); he passed six months ago (February 4, 2019). Mom passed away three years ago (July 27, 2016). They moved into Assisted Living in September of 2015 (I think – but that doesn’t seem like that LONG ago! Could Mom and Dad have declined to a point of death in just four short years? It doesn’t seem possible!) Yet, it happened.

I was a regular visitor to Mom and Dad’s for a couple of years before that as Mom had stopped driving and I took over getting her to her appointments. Of course, that was about the time she began her serious decline. We’d discussed them moving out of their townhome because of her decreasing mobility and Dad’s increasing memory issues. They fought that one tooth-and-nail for a long time. Then Mom had her last knee replacement. She was certain she’d bounce back just like she had from the previous one. She was around my age – in her early sixties – when she started the process of becoming a “bionic woman” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bionic_Woman) with both hips and both knees replaced, as well as wearing a pacemaker. It was our standing joke.

But when she was in her early 80s, she begged for and eventually got, her second knee replacement. But she wasn’t a kid anymore and afterward, she was in so much pain, she refused to do PT. She refused to walk. Edema set in. I started coming to their home to help; and discovered Dad’s “pill system”. I got permission to see Mom’s records (because I was going to all of her appointments and taking her to the hospital) and eventually Dad’s medical records as well, for the same reason…the rest, shall we say, is history.

So, a minimum of a year before they moved into assisted living: four years. So four years in which my grandchildren aged, my son and daughter aged, my daughter got married six months after my mom passed – and we were able to add a “taco bar” to the reception menu, which is what new son-in-law had wanted from the beginning.

Let’s say a half of a decade.

Wasted, some people would say. For me, it was a time of incredibly rough growth. I am not the man I was four or five years ago. What kind of man am I now? Hmmm. I’m not sure yet. If you follow the blog, maybe you’ll see me change or the better.

Image: https://c2.staticflickr.com/6/5527/10893068965_1d328e8f71_b.jpg