Stroke damage = vascular dementia

An update on Alzheimer’s Aunt: after many delays, she finally went to a throat specialist. He found that her throat was 60% closed (if I understand it correctly; this is 3d hand information filtered through her) and she has one or more throat polyps. He “opened” her throat while she was under anesthesia and then she was required to take some “suspension” drug for 30 days. Turns out her insurance didn’t pay for that drug and it was $300 so someone made the decision simply not to get it for her.
Fast forward two weeks to Thanksgiving at my mom’s house. I was sick that whole week and my mom was going to move the turkey dinner to Sunday, but Alzheimer’s Aunt decided she was coming so we couldn’t cancel. I didn’t feel like being with people or eating, but as a dutiful daughter I went to see my mom and my cousin (and my aunt, I guess). I didn’t much feel like eating—I had been sick for 5 days at that point, sleeping about 20 hours a day due to intense pain in my head (probably, looking back, I had a sinus infection, but between the holiday and the weekend there was no way to get to a doctor and on Monday I was getting better already). I took a very small amount of food just to be polite.
Alzheimer’s Aunt loaded up her plate with everything. My mom had accidently bought a six pack of caffeine-free Pepsi instead of caffeine-free Diet Pepsi and since Alzheimer’s Aunt is a Pepsi fanatic (addict) my mom offered it to her.
I had finished about half my meager plate when Aunt started to hiccup. I pushed the plate away and walked into the living room and laid on the couch. When someone asked why, I said, “I don’t want to be trampled” meaning by her when she starts to vomit and that was taken as a joke.
Did Alzheimer’s Aunt stop eating when she started hiccupping? No of course not. She kept shoveling food into her mouth, just like the time with the donut.

I’m going to do an aside here. If, as part of his Alzheimer’s, my dad had started to choke and “spit up” when he ate, and he had a clear warning sign such as hiccups, there is no way I would allow him to keep eating or to stay at the table once the warning bell commenced. He would be immediately told, “Bob, go into the bathroom.” If he didn’t go, he’d be led there. Of course, my cousins would say that’s a perfect example of me “being mean” to my dad, while I see it as an example of taking care of someone who can’t take care of himself. 

Finally the people remaining at the table persuaded her to get up. Instead of going into the bathroom, she went the other way, into the kitchen. Meaning to get to the bathroom she would have to then go through the crowded dining room. Of course, while in the kitchen, it started. She forced her way through the dining room, spewing and gagging, into the bathroom.
This happened at least 4 times. (I went to sleep on the couch.) I don’t know how much of a mess she made in my mom’s bathroom, but last time she left it there for someone else to clean up (actually I cleaned it and told my mom after).
I was invited back to the table for dessert but between being sick and hearing puking, I declined. My cousin commented to her mother, “I noticed that you get sick when you drink soda or eat bread. The other night you drank water and didn’t eat bread and you were okay.” Alzheimer’s Aunt’s instant response: “I didn’t eat bread.” “You were eating stuffing, that’s bread, and you drank several cans of Pepsi.” “I didn’t eat bread.”
Sigh.
I wonder if, 2 weeks before, if she had been giving the prescribed drug, if she would not have been “spitting up” all over the place on Thanksgiving. I can only assume the procedure failed, whether due to the lack of the drug or some other reason.
Aunt was talking about the throat procedure. She said, “I thought I had throat cancer all this time!” I was dumbfounded. If I thought I had cancer, I wouldn’t wait TWO YEARS and LIE to my doctor about symptoms. I wouldn’t even wait two weeks, not after I saw my friend lose her mom in 13 days from cancer—less than two weeks from diagnosis to death last year. Seemingly fine at Thanksgiving, dead by Christmas.
Since Thanksgiving, there has been another bout of “go check on her, she’s dead” wherein it was found that she had left her traditional phone off the hook and turned off her cell phone. My cousin said, “she can’t understand that she needs to hang up the phone because she lost so much comprehension due to the strokes.” I said, “Yes, that’s vascular dementia.” “No, my mother doesn’t have dementia! She’s not like your dad.” (well that much is true) Well, according to this site and many others, “Stroke, small vessel disease, or a mixture of the two can cause vascular dementia.” That seems pretty straightforward to me.
In other Alzheimer’s Aunt news, one of her out-of-state children has decided to move back into the hoarded house and get it fit for habitation. Then she is going to give up her apartment (she’s been there what, a month?) and move back in with her child and child-in-law as caregivers. The house has been about 90% cleaned out (3 overflowing 25-yard dumpsters of trash) but there’s still a whole room of things she “has to have” and of course the place is filthy beyond imagining, smells horrible, and needs pretty much everything done—floors refinished/replaced, bathroom remodeled downstairs for her use, everything else scrubbed and/or painted and/or replaced. Good luck to the two of them moving in there. I wouldn’t live there even for free like they will be.
(I am going to continue calling her Alzheimer’s Aunt because it has a nice ring and Dementia Aunt is ugly. I know now she doesn’t have Alzheimer’s, of course.)
image source 

Alzheimer's Aunt falls down

The view from my font window; beyond the fence
is a sidewalk and on the other side of the tree is the street.

Unless you've been living under a rock, you know that we in New England just got walloped with a huge snowstorm.  My town got 38 inches of snow in one day and at one point supposedly snow was falling at 6 inches per hour.  Lotta snow.
If you want to watch it in action, there is an awesome video (less than a minute) in time-lapse. 
So you can imagine what it was like to shovel out of this insane mess, even with a snowblower.
After 3 days, I finally got my car out.  I called my cousin and said "I'm venturing out, does your mom need anything?"  The reply was "well she's not shoveled out so she wouldn't be able to get anything you brought."  Okay.
 I called my own mom who said she was going to walk to Wal-mart to buy dog food.  I told her no, that I would buy it and bring it.  But her street wasn't plowed yet (cul-de-sac) and neither was the street leading to it.  I convinced her that the dog could survive on just dry food for a few days and set off on my own adventures.
Of course who do I see wandering down the street on foot, clutching a bag of dog food?  MY MOM!  I get her into my SUV and get her as close to home as I could (not very, unfortunately) and promised to take her to the store for real the next day if the street's still unplowed.
The next day I am waiting for her to call me about going to the store together and my cousin calls wanting Alzheimer's Aunt dug out and driven around.  Of course everyone has a million reasons why they can't do it and I have to.  I was pretty angry; I said "I've got my own mom to deal with, her street isn't plowed and neither is the street that's attached to."  So then I had BOTH of them in the car.  And later my mom complained how bad Alzheimer's Aunt STUNK.  She REEKED.   It's her breath, like death, like a dead animal under the porch in the summer, combined with an unwashed body and dirty clothing.
My mom was actually coming over my house after shopping to help me dig out my husband's car, so he could finally go to work rather than keep working from home.  So that's my mom, who does stuff.  In contrast, this is Alzheimer's Aunt once she's in the car:
"I tried to go outside and I fell down."
I just clamped my mouth shut.  When there's almost 4 feet of snow, it doesn't make you fall down.  It holds you up.
"I couldn't get up, I laid in the snow for 15 minutes."
I just don't believe her. I don't believe she even went outside.
"No one came and shoveled my sidewalk."
Finally I spoke.  "Who did you think would come when every road in the state was closed?"
"I thought my neighbors would do it."
"Did you ask them for help?"
"No."
"Then why did you think they would shovel for you?"
"They would see that I didn't shovel."
Well, for all they knew, you weren't even HOME.  And I bet if she had gone outside and made the slightest effort and others were outside shoveling, someone might have come over and asked if she needed help.  Sitting in the house, no doubt with the stuck-out lip face, pouting, isn't how you get your walk shoveled.
I announce, rather loudly and passive-aggressively, that I need gas for my car.
The silence is deafening.
So I have to shovel you out and drive you around but you can't pitch in for gas money?!
The next day, I was talking to my cousin about her.  I learned that Alzheimer's Aunt has spent approximately $6,000 in the last few months that can't be accounted for.  Part of it may be her house taxes, but even if she paid the whole year, that wouldn't be that much money.  I said, "Do you have power of attorney?  It's simple.  Invoke it.  Take her checkbook, take all her credit cards.  Call QVC and cancel her account.  Have new credit cards issued so any cards she has saved online (like at Amazon) won't work.  Go to the bank and say that she cannot take money out of her accounts anymore or get any loans.  Give her $200 cash for groceries and nothing else."  Then my cousin said that Alzheimer's Aunt has been going to her bank and opening $5,000 lines of credit like they are free money.  She has a mortgage on the house (she's lived in it for over 40 years) too, we don't know for how much or what she spent that money on.  But no one wants to invoke the PoA and "deal with all that" so they will let her spend herself into the ground. 
I suggested (I know I'm not supposed to suggest) that it's time she move into senior housing. "No, it would cost more."  I did the math and I think it would be significantly less.  The mortgage payment is about what rent would be.  She would no longer have to pay house taxes, water/sewer, oil, gas, or electric.  How would it cost more? Oh, but she can't live in a simple 1 bedroom senior apartment because she's got a 3 bedroom house hoarded to the brim with stuff she won't give up.
Is she going to the doctor anytime soon?  Getting tests?  Anyone care what's really wrong with her expect me, the person she cares about the least? 
Nope.
It's all very sad.
Also, in an aside, 1 year ago today my grandma had her (final) stroke and we pulled the plug.  I will write about her later.

Xmas and Alzheimer's Aunt, and more awards

It is interesting to me to examine the difference in my feelings toward my dad's illness (absolutely Alzheimer's--hey someone should photoshop an Absolut ad for Alzheimer's) and toward my aunt's illness which may or may not be some kind of dementia, Alzheimer's or just generic insanity.   Of course, she is not my dad (or my mom) so I'm more distant from the problem, and I was never close to her even before all this.
But I think the biggest thing is her children's inability to DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.
I saw Alzheimer's Aunt (AA) at my cousin's house on Christmas Eve.  There was a mix-up over food; I was incorrectly told there would only be snacks while we opened gifts, so I ate lunch first, and then got there to discover a huge meal laid out, so the fact that I didn't really eat anything caused some tension.
I got stuck next to AA on the couch during gift time.  We were all drinking eggnog and being festive.  AA started gagging and puked her eggnog back into her glass and then set it on the table beside my glass.  Yes, a glass of puked-up eggnog is just the thing on a cold holiday evening.  I had been enjoying my eggnog until that point. After that, I just wanted to go home.  She insisted on playing a holiday trivia game from the 1970s and was angry when none of us could answer any of the questions or frankly, cared.  She spent about 15 minutes telling a long rambling story about something that happened 40 years ago that had no relevance to what was going on currently.  She seems to have no connection to the here-and-now anymore, and when she tries (see below), she fails.  I know slipping in time is an Alzheimer's thing, although my dad never did it.
Then Alzheimer's Aunt tried to talk to my cousin's boyfriend about a TV show she saw that she thought had something to do with the place where he works. 
"What station was it on?" (he is trying to be polite)
"I don't know." 
"What was the name of the show?"
"I don't know."
"What day was it on?"
"I don't know." 
"What else was it about?"
"I don't know.  But have you seen it?" 
"Uh, I don't know?" 
I felt so bad for him.  Basically that's her conversation:  old stories that we've heard before, from the 60's mostly, and that we don't care about, or her trying to explain something she saw on TV that she didn't understand and can't remember.
We tried to play a word game that involved cards with big letters on them (you made words from the cards in your hand) and even though the letters were several inches high in the middle of the cards, she complained constantly that she couldn't read them.  I ended up quitting the game halfway through out of sheer annoyance.
When it was time to leave, of course, just like last year, AA wasn't capable of carrying her own bag of gifts to the car and everyone had to rush around babying her.  My cousin, whose house we were at, said "Watch the steps" as AA left.  AA walked outside and promptly tripped over the welcome mat.  My cousin said, "I told you to watch out!" and AA replied, "you said the STEPS, not the RUG."  Really? 
The next day Alzheimer's Aunt came to my mom's house for the family Christmas dinner.  I had invited some friends as well, one being my friend who lost her mom to Alzheimer's and who also just lost her elderly aunt, leaving her free of sick old ladies to care for, for the first time in many years.  My friend majored in psychology and works at a rehab facility that also has group therapy for all kinds of mental illnesses.  Point being, she knows it when she sees it.
Partway through the meal, AA started hiccuping.  That is the signal that she's going to blow.  We managed to talk her into actually going into the bathroom rather than spewing vomit all over the table like she usually does.  After a few minutes in the bathroom, she came back in and started eating again.  I might note that there was never a sound of running water so she didn't wash her hands or rinse her mouth.  As usual (like the night before) her hygiene was severely lacking.  Her breath smells like death.  Her hair isn't clean or brushed.  She sleeps in her clothes, wearing them for days, and they stink. But she pours on cheap perfume like that will hide the rest, and it only makes it worse.
After the meal, I went to use the bathroom, and discovered that Alzheimer's Aunt had vomited all over the floor and the wall and just left it there, no attempt to clean it up. (Makes me wonder about the state of her bathroom, but then I decide I don't want to know.)  I cleaned it up as best I could but I was really pissed off.  She could have said something to my mom, or asked for a roll of paper towels or something.  Everyone was joking about how long I took in the bathroom and I just said, "Oh, I ate too much" but I really wanted to say "I was cleaning up puke from everywhere!  It was DISGUSTING."  Privately a bit later I told my mom what had happened and she was pretty angry too.  She thanked me for trying to clean it up. (And after we left, she said she scrubbed the whole bathroom with bleach because she didn't know where the puke had been.)
My friend said that whatever else is going on, whether it's dementia or Alzheimer's or something else, that Alzheimer's Aunt is severely mentally ill.  She was appalled at the whole puking thing.  So I feel a little vindicated, that it's not just me.
AA's stories keep changing.  She's blind, but she's reading a book. Then she wants someone to take her to  Barnes and Noble because she can't drive, only she IS driving because she talks about going somewhere by herself.  My mom drove by her house and said AA had backed the car in, missed the driveway, was half in the yard, in a bush, almost against the house.  I saw the car parked a similar way. She says when she goes out that she "picks a car and follows it" presumably hoping it's going where she is?  That could be why she gets lost all the time. She "can't see" her phone so she dials random numbers and talks to strangers.  We switched her plan to unlimited minutes yet she ran out of minutes somehow.   She said she paid the bill.  But she didn't.  I guess she thought having a prepaid phone meant you just pay once?  No clue.
The bottom line with Alzheimer's Aunt is this: In the last year she has lost an alarming amount of weight.  She looks sick, not healthy--her skin is grey and sagging.  Her hygiene has deteriorated to the point of not having any.  She vomits uncontrollably when she eats.  She claims to be blind although eye doctors say her eyes are fine.  She makes no sense when she talks.  Her doctor gave her a partial dementia test, which she seems to have failed but he made excuses for her wrong answers so she did not get any kind of brain scan to look for damage or disease.  Her family will not test her for any kind of mold toxicity because "the doctor did a regular blood test and she's ok" even though a mold test is a specialty test. AA refuses to see any other doctor that might be competent and actually diagnose her and give her a treatment plan.
I alternate between feeling helpless and feeling very angry.  Whenever she does anything stupid or gross or inappropriate I have to literally bite my lips to keep from speaking up.  My friend, who has finally witnessed Alzheimer's Aunt in action, said that I'm not wrong to feel this way, but she's not my parent and her own children are in willful denial about their mother's poor state of health.  Between whatever's going wrong inside her, and the unhealthy hoarder environment of her home, she's going to die.  And she used to be a nice lady, a smart lady, someone who was interesting to talk to.  It's such a waste.
I loved my dad and his illness was a waste too.  But at least we fought it, we took him for treatments, we enrolled him in clinical trials, we took him to various doctors.  We didn't sit back and say "Oh, that Bob, he's always been a little strange" and just let him die.

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Healthline

Now onto something good. I'm up for 2 more awards for this blog. For Healthline's Best Blog of 2012 contest, you can vote EVERY DAY on both TWITTER and FACEBOOK.  Ends February 15, 2013
For the Senior Homes Best Senior Living blog (which I was also nominated for last year) you can vote ONE TIME through FACEBOOK and once through GOOGLE+.

5 years gone, and Alzheimer's Aunt strikes again

This week was the 5 year anniversary of my dad's death.  He's been gone longer than he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's.  I'm not really any sadder than usual, except when I re-watched the episode of Walking Dead where Maggie tells her dad (who has been bitten by a zombie, and his leg cut off to try to save him) that it's okay for him to die.  The specifics of the speech, of course, weren't equal to the one I gave my dad, but it was 5 years ago to the day that I gave "it's okay to go" talk to my dad, and there I was watching it on TV.  I did cry, I admit.  I posted about it on Facebook and one of my friends talked about how hard it had been to give that talk to her mom when she was dying of cancer.  You have to say all the usual things.   
I love you.  It's okay to go.  I'll be fine.  We'll all be fine.  There won't be any more pain once you leave.  I will miss you every day, but it's better for you if you go.
My mom and I went to see the movie Lincoln and his last lines are something like, "it's time for me to go, but I'd much rather stay" and he goes off to the theater.  I'd like to think we'd all rather stay, given the choice, but with if your life is full of pain and suffering, sometimes it is time to go.
Another Walking Dead moment (it's a great show) this season was when Hershel (recipient of the zombie bite and the "it's okay to go dad" speech several episodes later) inexplicably asks his daughters to sing "The Parting Glass."  I have read it, in poem form, and it's dreadfully sad.  Why you'd want to hear it sung during the zombie apocalypse, I don't know.  It's even sadder when it's sung.

Here are some of the lyrics. It's supposed to be a drinking song but it seems to me like a dying song and always has seemed like that:
Of all the comrades that e'er I had
They're sorry for my going away
And all the sweethearts that e'er I had
They'd wish me one more day to stay
But since it fell unto my lot
That I should rise and you should not
I gently rise and softly call
Good night and joy be to you all
Fill to me the parting glass
And drink a health whate’er befalls
And gently rise and softly call
Good night and joy be to you all
I've been melancholy all week, between anniversary of dad dying and the onset of my yearly Seasonal Affective Disorder so I'm in non-functioning cocoon form for the next few weeks.

---

Except today.  Today was special.  And last night.  I got to see Alzheimer's Aunt.  Oh how exciting.
I got an URGENT text last night at 5:30:  "You have to go to the store NOW and buy Pepsi and bring to (AA)."  Really?  Being out of soda is now a national emergency?  I replied that I could go around 6:30 as I was not home.  At 6:28 I texted my cousin to tell him to tell Alzheimer's Aunt I was coming over.  I went to the drug store AT THE END OF AA's STREET (ie, she could have walked there) and bought 4 small cold bottles of Pepsi as directed (not diet,  not caffeine free, not big bottles, not cans, not room temperature) for the outrageous price of $8 and was at her door by 6:44 pm.
And she didn't answer.
I was just about to dump the soda on the porch and go home when she finally came to the door. 
"I was going to bed because you never showed up." 
"Didn't (my cousin) tell you that I was coming over?"
"yes but not when and you didn't come immediately so I was going to bed, I couldn't wait for you anymore." 
Yet the soda delivery was incredibly urgent?  I was like, whatever, and I left, really feeling put-upon for being treated like a delivery girl and not even getting a thank you.  I expect lack of courtesy from Alzheimer's Aunt but nothing from my cousin, who claims he told his mother I was coming at 6:30 and he doesn't know why she went to bed instead.
And don't forget, Alzheimer's Aunt isn't supposed to be drinking soda, only water, and no carbs in her diet.
Today I was going to take a drive and go to a store I like that's about 20 miles away and eat lunch at a restaurant nearby that's the closest location to me.  A nice couple of hours.  Instead, Alzheimer's Aunt wanted me to go to lunch with family members.  They were supposed to pick me up after taking her to the bank at 11.  So I figure, 11:30 or so.  Then it's 12:30, and nothing, no text, no calls, no car in the driveway.  Finally I get a text. "(AA) wanted to go to the library, the liquor store, and the craft store.  We'll pick you up soon."  Really?  I love the amount of time this blind woman spends at the library checking out books and buying craft supplies she can't use.  And what if I wanted to go to the craft store, I wasn't even asked.
By the time they picked me up it was after 1 p.m. and I was hungry.  We went to a seafood place I don't like very much but I'll eat a hotdog there (it's a New England thing--fried seafood and hotdogs in a little shack).  We start eating.  Alzheimer's Aunt starts hiccuping.  I start frantically trying to cram my hotdog into my mouth because I know what's coming.  Sure enough, BLAEAGH--puke everywhere.  Down her shirt, her pants, onto the floor, her purse, the table.  Then she just sits there wide eyed while my cousins scramble to get napkins and literally clean her up like she's a baby.  (everyone in the place staring at us, of course--luckily no one sitting right next to the puke bomb) They try to get her to go to the bathroom and clean herself up but she refuses.  I handed the rest of my hotdog and my fries off to my cousins and just sat there staring silently at the wall until it was time to leave while everyone else FINISHED THEIR FOOD (and mine).  I don't know how they do it, once the puke starts I can't eat anymore.  One of my cousins suggested, mildly, that Alzheimer's Aunt talk to her doctor again about the vomiting and AA just kind of waved her hands and said "I know but he says it's nothing."  Nothing.  For a grown woman to vomit all over herself, almost every time she eats?  I know I harp on that, because IT IS NOT NOTHING.  IT IS SOMETHING. 
Every time someone outside the family asks me "how is (AA) doing" I answer, "I don't know, I don't care, and I don't want to know."  I don't care if it makes me a bitch.  I can't handle this.  If she was being cared for properly by a competent doctor, if she had a real diagnosis and prognosis and treatment plan and medicine, I wouldn't be so angry.  She's going to DIE and my cousins are just blithely going along, enabling her bad behavior and reinforcing it and when they find her dead in her hoard it's really going to slap them in the face.  And no doubt somehow I will get blamed for it.

Alzheimer's Aunt in Limbo

Finally one of Alzheimer's Aunt's (AA) children took her to a doctor.  Not a competent doctor, not a geriatric doctor, not any kind of specialist, but an old quack whom my mom hates and believes contributed to the death of my dad's aunt (who also had dementia/Alzheimer's).  This guy is old, he is incompetent, he doesn't care.  And old ladies LOVE him.  My grandma used to go to him and my mom made her change to a geriatric doctor who didn't enable her bad behavior.  I wanted Alzheimer's Aunt to go to this same geriatric doctor, but NO, she likes Dr Quackenberger and she's old and she's blind and we can't possibly take her to a different doctor.
And taking her to ANY doctor was held up because she had no insurance, she never applied for Medicare or she threw away her card or whatever reason, she wasn't getting Social Security, she spent the whole $60,000 golden handshake from her job in well under a year and now she thinks she's "broke" even though she makes more than twice what my mom does (and my mom still works!).
So most of the concerns I begged my cousins to bring up were ignored. They asked the doctor about her "possible" dementia/Alzheimer's and the vomiting.  Nothing about mold.  Or psychosomatic problems.  The stupid doctor asked her TWO questions to determine if she has dementia/Alzheimer's.  TWO.  What are your children's ages and birthdays (she said her 41 year old son was 30 but she knew his birth date so apparently that counts as a right answer?!) and to draw a clock, which she did badly and blamed on the "blindness."  She had a basic blood test that showed her liver and kidneys were fine.  Not a test for mold exposure.  When pushed he said he could do a CAT scan or CT scan (I don't know the difference and I wasn't there to hear exactly what he said) of her head but overall he seemed completely unconcerned by any of her extremely alarming symptoms.  (and no head scan was actually scheduled)

The vomiting, he just dismissed out of hand.  That baffles me.  If I started vomiting whenever I ate, I would go to a doctor. I know this for a fact because a few years ago I started vomiting when I ate ice cream, drank milk, or (oddly) ate raw brownies or cookie dough and yes my fat ass was at the doctor to find out why!  I was also coughing uncontrollably until I vomited from that too, no food necessary.  And they immediately scheduled a barium swallow because they thought I had cancer--a tumor that was in or near both my stomach and lung pushing on them, making me cough and vomit. I didn't have a tumor, only a hiatal hernia, and they gave me some medicine and said I also had viral bronchitis, and eventually I stopped coughing. I stopped drinking milk, eating ice cream, brownie mix and cookie dough and threw up only from coughing, and that rarely.  But I didn't just blithely puke everywhere and go on with my life and expect everyone around me to not react to vomit! And to this day, milk makes me vomit unless it is organic (and in tea, it still sets me off sometimes) so guess what, I don't drink non-organic milk and when I have tea with organic milk I don't have very much and keep a plastic bag or small trash can handy.
So the end result of the doctor visit is...nothing.  Maybe some kind of scan, who knows when, seemed pretty casual.
I was on vacation (you can read all about it here; if it's the future, go back to October of 2012 for the 6 vacation entries) with no phone so blessedly for over a week I knew nothing about AA's problems and didn't even think about her.  My mom had said that if Alzheimer's Aunt called her with a pointless demand (I lost my glasses!  I unplugged my computer!  I want to go for a ride right now!) she was going to ignore it.  I guess that didn't happen; my mom didn't mention it if it did.
We came back to Hurricane Sandy (we battled it on the cruise as well) and we had our own problems to deal with so I had no time for her.  I did talk to one of my cousins, who said she had to go there every other day to deal with something or others, and that her mom is "so depressed" and that she "can't deal" with anything and she can't concentrate on books on tape and she can't read big print books and she's still having problems with medical insurance, she claims to have paid for some COBRA coverage but there's no cancelled check, direct withdrawal or credit card payment for any.
My cousin's thought on the vomiting is that Alzheimer's Aunt eats "inappropriate food" that's "too hard to eat" because one time she saw AA eat pancakes and she didn't vomit.  Well I saw her puke up half a plate of spaghetti, how is that harder to eat than a pancake? 
Apparently Alzheimer's Aunt needs a dentist now, so we have to find out about dental insurance, which for some reason my cousins think is part of Medicare but I don't think that's the case.  I know Alzheimer's Aunt doesn't brush her teeth, her breath stinks, so it wouldn't be at all surprising if her teeth are rotten.  Apparently once someone finds out about medical insurance I'm in charge of taking AA to my dentist, who is a really sweet lady from India who hugs me and is very kind.  I hate to expose her to AA's filthy body and sewer-stink mouth and irrational speech. 
A couple of weeks ago Alzheimer's Aunt demanded once again to be taken to Verizon to get the pictures off her old, broken (frustration over voice mail) phone and then to be taken to Barnes and Noble to get her Nook working.   I'm confused why someone who insists in every other sentence that she is "blind" or "can't see" needs photos or an e-reader.  We looked it up and apparently the Nook doesn't read to you (my Kindle does, I say smugly).  I tried to use the Nook to figure it out and show her, and wow what a confusing mess. I love my Kindle!  (sorry for the spontaneous ad; I do plug things I enjoy)
So the end result is, eye doctors say there is nothing wrong with her eyes.  Medical doctor says the vomiting is no big deal and there's no dementia or Alzheimer's (even though no tests were done).  So we have a person who claims to be blind, pukes constantly, and makes no sense when she talks, but she's okay!?  
I give up.