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 

The Last Time

This morning I was thinking about two different friends of mine, both facing losing their moms to cancer.  At least they get this holiday season with their moms, and they know it's the last one, is the direction my thoughts went, and I started composing some sort of holiday blog post in the back of my mind.
And when I got home from driving and musing, and logged onto Facebook, I saw to my dismay that one friend's mom had succumbed to her cancer only 2 weeks after her diagnosis.  Last year was their last holiday together and they didn't know it.  Her mom was healthy and fine in mid-November (or thought she was).
You don't know when it will be the last time.  The last time you see someone, talk to them, celebrate a holiday, hoist a pint, laugh or cry or cringe at a movie together.  It is worse when a healthy person gets taken in an accident of course, as there is no warning, but as my friend just found out to her sorrow, a mom can be fine on Thanksgiving and dead of cancer by Christmas.
When my dad got diagnosed, the doctors estimated, based on his age and how far his Alzheimer's had progressed, that he would live approximately 11 years.  How GOOD those years might have been, they didn't say.  Just that he should have made it to about 75 years old.  So at that last Christmas, the one we didn't know was the last, in 2006, we thought we had 8 or 9 more years, when in truth it was less than a year.  
Ironically, every year my mom thinks it's her mother's last Christmas (she's 93 now) and every year Grandma keeps going like the Energizer bunny.  We're almost numb to thinking about her not being here anymore, to the point that when it does happen, we're going to be in total shock.
I guess we all know somewhere deep inside that anyone and anything can be taken from us without warning. And maybe we should live like that, never going away mad or holding a grudge.  Always kissing our loved ones goodbye and telling them they are loved.  But we don't.  We get angry.  We slam doors.  We leave without saying goodbye.  Everyone would like to think they are immortal and so are all their loved ones.

I believe that as long as someone remembers us, our memory is immortal, and our souls hang out in the Elsewhere Bar and do whatever needs to be done in the next life.  But Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia can steal away even that breath of life, taking those memories forever.
I can't offer a solution.  I'm not a god or a doctor, just a person who has lost so much, who grieves to see her friends in similar sorrow.  
Love who you have while you have them, and remember them fondly every day after that.

115 "come on" and bit of med news

So much to say, so little time to write.
A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of going grocery shopping with my parents. We were coming back from somewhere and my mom needed to buy a few things to cook for the holiday.
Going shopping with my dad is like walking the dog. Every ten seconds, you have to say "come on, come on" and tug. I have joked that the dog must think his name is "come on" when he's being walked; well my dad must think that's his name while he's in Stop and Shop. He had to go to the bathroom (dad, not dog) and I had to wait outside for him, otherwise he couldn't find us. What happens when he starts to need help? Most places don't have family bathrooms.
I believe I already mentioned my grandmother getting taken to the emergency room for her "heart attack" which turned out to be a back spasm. The doctor noted a shadow on her lungs in the x-ray. My mom was worried about lung cancer (my grandpa smoked cigars) so she was going to bring my grandmother back in to get her lungs checked for that. But then my grandmother demanded to be taken to the hospital again and it turns out she has pneumonia. In fact, although it was the medi-quick place and not the emergency room, it was the same doctor! So she got antibiotics. My mother kept the appointment with the regular doctor and he switched my grandmother to a more powerful antibiotic. Then she had an allergic reaction and yup, you guessed it, had to be rushed to the emergency room. I stayed with my father for one of these (it was a Saturday--NYE/Eve). I tried to make him something nice for lunch. He wanted bread. I tried to put peanut butter on it. He wanted toast with butter. Then he almost set his eyebrows on fire leaning over the (pop up) toaster trying to see if the bread was ready. Pretty much he ignores me when I'm there, whether my mom's there or not. But when I'm leaving, he runs out and demands "when are you coming again?"
My grandmother's new thing is that she doesn't want my dad there when she goes to the doctor or the emergency room. This is a hardship to my mom who has to find someone (ie, me or her best friend) to stay with my dad. It's a lot easier for her to just bring him along. I don't know why my grandmother is acting like that. My mother said that my grandmother is going to have to start to call ME to take her to the doctor if she can't bring my dad, and my grandmother responded that "she doesn't care" (meaning me). I can't win.
So this is my life right now.

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Medical news: they've found a source of stem-cells that doesn't require embryos. Can this mean that the President will actually start to allow research on new "lines" again?
Stem cell researchers reacted with enthusiasm and reservations to a report that scientists have found stem cells in amniotic fluid, a discovery that would allow them to sidestep the controversy over destroying embryos for research....(T)he stem cells they drew from amniotic fluid donated by pregnant women hold much the same promise as embryonic stem cells....the scientists still don't know exactly how many different cell types can be made from the stem cells found in amniotic fluid. The scientists said preliminary tests in patients are years away....The cells from amniotic fluid can clearly generate a broad range of important cell types, but they may not do as many tricks as embryonic stem cells....
The hallmark of human embryonic stem cells, which are created in the first days after conception, is the ability to turn into any of the more than 220 cell types that make up the human body. Researchers are hopeful they can train these primordial cells to repair damaged organs in need of healthy cells.
However, many people, including President Bush, oppose the destruction of embryos for any reason. The Bush administration has restricted federal funding for the embryo work since 2001, leading many scientists to search for alternative stem cell sources.
This, like so many other things, won't help my dad, but it will help someone else's loved one.

108 Thanksgiving, dad & grandma -style

We had Thanksgiving at my mom's house, as usual. My mother-in-law brought shrimp cocktail, stuffed mushrooms and a lovely cake. My dad loves shrimp cocktail. He would have eaten ONLY shrimp for his Thanksgiving meal if we hadn't taken the platter away. Then he didn't know what anything was. He would point. He said "I don't know what this is, but it's good" about the stuffing, but then he was picking it out of his mouth (and putting it into the stuffed mushrooms serving platter of all places). He also picked the mushrooms out of his mouth.
My grandmother was her obnoxious holiday self. She claims to be "sick" and that we "don't understand" how sick her medicines make her. My mother and I tell her constantly to just stop taking them them, but then she's "sick" in a different way. There's no winning. She actually drove herself, in spite of the rain, but then complained that she was tired, she was missing her nap, etc. She treats my dad like he's 5, she either talks down to him or around him, and I don't like that. (Not that I never talk around him, but I don't talk to him like he's a baby.)
The cake was to celebrate my husband getting a new job. My grandmother picked up a knife and hacked a random hunk of out it before Will even got to see it, and then got angry that it was chocolate, and went on a tirade about how she can't eat chocolate. Will just sat there in shock. "She ruined my cake," he said in disbelief. Funny that she eats chocolate éclairs every Sunday and never complains. But on Thanksgiving, chocolate makes her sick. Then she left. Apparently the next day she called my mom and was angry that she didn't get any of the dessert my mom made me ( graham cracker-pudding-chocolate yummy melange). We didn't offer it to her after her anti-chocolate rant. Why would we? She is getting so very rude, and she seems to think that's okay because she's 88. Ruining the cake is only part of it. On Sunday nights when we're over, she puts on this tape of country music (which Willy and I HATE) at full loud volume and does her "exercises" (simple stretches) totally ignoring us. She has ALL DAY to do this stupid tape, why does she wait until we're there? She sees me for 2 hours a week, and that's how she choses to spend that time? She knows we hate the music and basically sit there gritting our teeth until she's done. If I got up and left when she turned it on, then I would be the rude one. I don't get it. She also doesn't do the puzzle. She does her "exercises" while we do the puzzle for her. I don't even want to stay anymore and work on the puzzles anymore. She picks these ugly dark paintings and they aren't fun to work on.
Friday Will had off from work so the four of us went out for lunch at the Pacific Buffet. Where my dad had, of course, more shrimp cocktail. They didn't have his "shells" (clams). Will said he saw my dad get kind of lost, he went to the other side of the dining room where we sat last time instead of where we were this time. Dad was scooping ice cream with the little plastic eating spoon but he thought it was funny. He explained how he thought the spoon was going to break (in Bob-speak). My mom said he was in a terrible mood that morning and she almost left him home but that got him even madder.
Will and I went to a movie and that night I went back over to do a puzzle. I had seen some cheap puzzles at Big Lot and my mom braved the Black Friday crowd with my dad and they picked some up. He choose a Noah's Ark puzzle for the animals. As soon as we started putting it together he lost interest and wandered off. He pointed to the picture of Noah and said "He's the guy! look, he's got the little thing." (Meaning, baby sheep he was carrying).
He also did something VERY funny. I had been there about half an hour, and we were eating our tea and crumpets (water and the chocolate graham cracker dessert) and my dad says "I saw that girl today. They said they were coming later." I had no idea what she was talking about. Then my mom said, "That girl is your daughter and she's sitting across the table from you." He looks over, says "hi!" very cheerfully, shakes my hand, and then says to my mom "I told you." It was hilarious.
Some days you have to laugh, or you cry.