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…
I love the concept
of time travel.
My favorite set of
movies are the BACK TO THE FUTURE Trilogy.
My wife and I just
spent the past week binge-watching Series 5 of DR. WHO.
STAR TREK (all of
the series!) have great fun playing with time travel – doing some of the most
impressive episodes of all time and introducing the entire Mirror Universe…
I LOVE TIME
TRAVEL!!!!
However. Captain
Kathryn Janeway in the Star Trek series, VOYAGER, had one of the most succinct
criticisms of time travel I’ve ever heard. In the episode “Future’s End”, she
says, “Time travel - from my first day on the job as captain, I swore that I
would never let myself get caught up in one of these God-forsaken paradoxes.
The future is the past, the past is the future...it all gives me a headache.”
I used to laugh at
that, but since Dad starting sliding from Stage Four firmly into Stage Five of
Alzheimer’s, her complaint has suddenly struck close to home.
Talking to Dad, I
get headaches petty regularly these days. Dad’s mind slides from sometime in
1941 when he was just ten years old, to the present. There are moments when he
forgets that my mom passed away (14 months ago now) only to remember that she
did almost before the words leave his mouth.
He’ll call and ask
where mom is…and after talking to him for a few minutes, I realize he’s talking
about HIS mother. She died in 1954. Dad was only 23 and on leave from the Air
Force because she was ill. His own father had died when he was sixteen.
In the previous
100 words, starting with “Talking to Dad…” you went from 2017 to 1941, back to
2017, then the middle of 2016 and onto 1954. That’s 70 years + 70 years + 1
year + 63 years, for a grand total of time travel years of 204 years.
I’ll never know
exactly how Dad felt either of those days because he just goes into a factual
explanation about how his dad was napping while he was on the phone with some
girl. After a while, Dad noticed that his father had stopped breathing. He gets
even more factual and brief after that, ending with, “June took care of most of
it.” June was my aunt. She was all of 29 when her mother died.
At any rate. The
disease has made my father into a time traveler – a lost time traveler at that.
While I’m still firmly rooted here, for him, he’s not unsure of what day or
time it is, he has no real perception even of what year it is.
“For example, the
perception of an ocean sunset combines a multitude of visual impressions; a
vast color palette with numerous shapes (a round red sun, the line of the
horizon, purple clouds of all shapes and sizes, etc.). But the experience is
more than just visual. The sound of the waves and the gulls flying overhead.
The smell and the taste of the salt water and the way the warm breeze feels
against your face. You may be enjoying the moment with friends, and this also
becomes a part of the overall experience, and of the memory.
“It is the
hippocampus that sorts and compares these impressions (like the sunset) and
creates a memory. Memories at this stage are short-term memories. The
hippocampus then decides if a particular memory will be committed to long-term
memory.
“So it is not
surprising that forgetting a recent event (short-term memory) is one of the
very first symptoms of this disease.”
OK – short term is
scrambled so he forgets what happened yesterday. What about the skipping
around?
“Patients with
Alzheimer's disease…received tests of recall and recognition, word-completion
priming, and incomplete-picture priming. [They] had impaired recall and
recognition…[and] impaired word-completion priming. [They also] had intact
incomplete-picture priming, a form of priming shown to be perceptual in normal
subjects. These results provide…evidence for a dissociation between two components
of repetition priming, perceptual priming…and nonperceptual priming...
Preserverd perceptual priming in AD may be mediated by the occipital regions
that are relatively spared in AD; compromised nonperceptual priming may be
mediated by temporal regions that show dense neuropathological changes early in
AD.”
In English? How
about this: Based on tests that looked at , Alzheimer’s people have trouble
remembering and recognizing things like pictures, words, and common sentences
(Like, “See Jane run,” or pictures of places, people, or things). People can usually
recognize words that are made up of words they already know – “airplane” for
example, “air” and “plane”. They have more trouble with words they’re
unfamiliar with, for example “Alzheimer’s”.
They also have
trouble repeating actions unless they’re used to them. Another problem they run
into is that there’s a weak connection with what’s happening “now” to Dad and
what happened in the past. He’s experienced past events more often, so he
remembers them. Current events aren’t attached to anything – except past events
– Dad knows what it’s like for someone close to you to die. He remembers HIS
mother dying. But not Mom dying and mentioning the current event sparks the
past event. Ideas, language, and how he responds to various people in various
situations – are damaged early on in Alzheimer’s.
So – Dad’s
memories skip all over the place whenever something that’s happening “now”
recalls something that happened “then”.
I still love time
travel – I just hate watching my dad travel in time. It recalls to mind a STAR
TREK: Deep Space 9 episode in which Captain Sisco’s son ages while the captain
stays the same age and is snapped into his son’s life at different times. We’ll
talk more about “The Visitor” next time and how it feels like what’s happening
to Dad.
Resource: http://www.best-alzheimers-products.com/the-alzheimers-brain.html#prettyPhoto,
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010945213803255
