178-b Alzheimer's + murder = much sadness follow up

I found the story my mom was alluding to. An 85 year old man, newly diagnosed with AD who had just signed paperwork to move into assisted living with his wife, instead decided to kill himself and her. He attacked her with a hammer; she died 2 weeks later, but evidently did not follow through on himself. He is being charged with murder despite his disease. (screenprint).

---

Yesterday I was in BJ's (a warehouse store) and I saw my dad's best friend. He came over to talk to me and ask how we were doing. He said, "I miss Bob," and he had such honest grief on his face that it was just heartbreaking.

128 "don't hit her"

I'm not writing as much, not just because I am busy with other things, but because my dad doesn't DO anything anymore. He hardly speaks. He picks his skin, stares at his hands, pees on himself, gets violent when he's frustrated.
Last Sunday, I don't know what set him off, but he started poking at my mother at the dinner table, smacking her arm. My husband grabbed my father's arm and started saying, very firmly, "Don't hit her," over and over, finally saying that if he kept hitting my mother, he'd end up in a nursing home. My dad sat there sullenly like a spoiled child, and then he went to the bathroom for a while. (He has no problem finding my grandmother's bathroom.) When he came out, he went and stood near the back door, wanting to go home immediately, so my mom packed up their stuff and the dog and took him home.
As soon as they were gone, my grandmother freaked out, started crying, getting all dramatic. We had to spend half an hour calming her down. She fusses at my father like he's 3--always wanting someone to wipe his face, fix his plate, he's using the wrong utensil or eating with his hands. I tried to explain to her to LET ALL THAT GO. None of that is important. He can't understand why he's being fussed at and corrected and frankly, who cares? I don't care if he eats with his hands or spills food on the table or puts gravy on his salad. I do care when he smacks my mother, or me, or lashes out in other ways. He only grabs and pinches her arms, not her face (so far), or once in a while her side or back. But it's wrong, and annoying, and it pisses me off to see her bruised. But when he is like that he is so strong--my husband wasn't there the night he flipped out in the restaurant. It's like a dual personality.
When I see him for lunch on Fridays, he recognizes my car and me (not as his daughter, or as "Bert" but as someone he knows) but after shaking my hand, he doesn't talk to me at all. Sometimes he doesn't even LOOK at me again, until we're leaving, and then he wants to know "when are you coming again?"
My mom told me that on Saturday, when she started to go to my grandmother's, my father said he didn't want to go there anymore and that if she made him go, he'd leave and walk home. Clearly he remembered was that he got yelled at there, therefore he doesn't want to return. He doesn't associate being yelled at with hitting my mom. Of course once he got there, he was fine and didn't go home. He was okay on Sunday too, didn't refer to the incident in any way (and did behave).
Friday night, my mom and I were playing a video game in the basement (I joined the Game Club at Big Fish games, so we can buy them for $6.99 rather than $20). My dad came downstairs in his usual confused way. We invited him to sit down and play the game with us. He didn't want to. He went into the other room and stood where the cat usually sleeps on the shelf, but the cat wasn't there (he was on a different shelf). My mom went into that room and showed him where the cat was. She came back and sat with me. We could hear my dad talking to the cat. Then he started swearing as if he had broken something--I don't remember the exact words, but basically oh shit-oh no-look at that-damn it. Actually my first thought was that he had hurt the cat, I don't know why. I don't think he would hurt the cat, he loves the cat.
My mom went in there and he had peed on himself. Not taken it out and peed, just let go where he was. I deliberately sat there and kept playing and ignored it, knowing he was embarrassed. Yelling at him for that does no good. He didn't want to change his clothes or take a shower. Finally my mom got him upstairs and got his pajamas on him, but he wasn't washed. She said he claimed that I was "laughing" at him for peeing himself. (I wasn't. I would never.) He came downstairs again and sat on the stairs watching us play the game, or sitting with his head down. He knows it's wrong to go in his pants and he gets very upset. But we think sometimes he can't find the bathroom. If he would do the little-boy thing and hold himself, it would be a clue and we could get him to the bathroom (there's even one downstairs, not 10 feet from where he peed on Friday).

127 piles of flesh

My birthday was last weekend (thank you) and we went out to dinner with my parents. My mom gave me the money up front so my dad wouldn't see her pay and have another meltdown. He doesn't care about me spending money, only her.
My mom had a huge bruise on her upper arm. My husband asked her what happened and she said my father did it. As he was shaking her, she told him to stop, that he was hurting her, and he denied it. The next day, when he saw the bruise, he asked her about it, and when she told him that HE did it, he said "no" and walked away.
A couple of days later, the bruise had faded from one huge blotch to a clear hand print.
I am not happy about this at all. I can't be there to protect my mom. In fact, seeing how ineffectual I was at the restaurant when he flipped out, I can' t protect her at all.
He has been doing some funny things, but I don't feel like laughing at them. He gets up in the middle of the night, gets fully dressed including his shoes and then gets back into bed. One morning he was in the bathroom swearing and my mother asked what was wrong. He told her he'd lost his foot. One of his sneakers had come off in the bed while he slept. Some nights he wears pajamas, some nights his clothes, some nights his underwear. He won't brush his teeth. He doesn't shower every day or change his clothes every day. He puts his clothes on over his pajamas, or wears a belt with his pajama bottoms.
It's all funny yes, haha, harmless and silly, but also so sad.
My mom wanted to go to a concert with her friend so I agreed to come over and stay with my dad, an 8 hour odyssey (my mom went out to dinner with her friend first, and the concert was over an hour's drive away). My husband came over for a little while too, and I made dinner (pizza). I made a plain pizza for my father (he won't eat regular pork sausage anymore, only turkey, but my husband and I like it) and one with sausage, peppers and pepperoni for us, figuring if we finished that pizza we'd eat some of the plain. My husband ate his half of the meat pizza, and I ate all but one slice of my half. My father ate all but one slice of the plain pizza.
Perhaps I should have put "ate" in quotes.
It turned out I wasn't in a sausage mood. I like sausage, but sometimes pork makes me sick. I picked some of the sausage off my pieces and gave it to the dog. Yes, I know, I'm the one who goes on and one about how fat the dog is and how we shouldn't feed him from the table. When my husband pointed that out, I gave the rest of my sausage to him.
Meanwhile my father was steadily devouring his plain cheese pieces. I guess my feeding the dog clued him in that the dog was there. He wanted a dish to feed the dog with (not that he could SAY that, but it was Bob-speak that I could figure out). I got the plastic "feed the pets" dish we've had my whole life (Nippy, Streaker, Alf, Patches, Jasper and Ace have all eaten off it) and my father cut up some of his pizza and gave it to the dog (crust and all). I put my and my husband's dishes in the sink, moved my leftover piece of pizza to the other pan and started doing the dishes including the plastic pet dish.
My father sat at the table and looked around. Then he looked on the nearby counter. Finally he got up and stood in front of the stove, where the rest of the pizza was. He looked at the leftover piece with sausage and peppers. "I don't want that," he said, flapping his hand at it. "No." I replied, "you don't have to eat it. It's not for you." He kept standing there looking at the pizza. The serving utensil was right there but I guess he couldn't figure it out. "Do you want another piece?" I finally asked him. "Yeah."
I put another piece on his plate. He sat down, removed the crusts, and put them far away. (Crusts, like grill marks on meat, are fat and he cuts them off and refuses to have them on his plate.) He cut the pizza up into little pieces (copying me, I believe) and then he started swearing because I had taken the dog's dish. I gave it back to him and he fed the entire slice of pizza to the dog. That pissed me off for a few reasons--wasteful, the dog's fat, and now there wasn't enough to take home for another meal.
My father wanted another piece. He indicated this by looking over at the stove, where two lonely pieces resided. Without acknowledging that I knew he wanted more, I put them in the fridge. Then it was another battle to get him to take his pills. Over and over during the meal I'd put the shot glass with his pills into his hand and said "you have to take these" and he'd say "yeah" and put it down. Now the meal was done and the pills were in the shot glass and not in Bob. "Take the pills." "Yeah." "You have to take these pills." "Yeah." Finally my husband got him to take them, I don't know how.
We went into the living room to watch movies. My mom has HBO so we watched some HBO On Demand stuff. Of course my dad didn't like any of it and complained mightily and grumbled and wandered around the house. He came back in with his hands smeared with blood. "Look." He showed us his bloody hands. We cleaned them with a wet cloth but couldn't find the wound. Then my husband saw that my dad's leg was bleeding. So we cleaned his knee and applied a bandaid. Within a few minutes he started digging at the skin on his knee just beneath the bandaid. He'd pull off a chunk of skin and put it on the coffee table. He'd switch to his other knee, and then to either hand, just making these macabre little piles of flesh. (It reminded me a little of an old George Carlin skit, where he talks about hoarding his scabs.) We'd say "stop picking" and then go back to the movie and a minute later he'd be digging. And no, these weren't scabs, these were flesh, tiny chunks of living flesh gouged off by his nails. It was gross beyond words. He would watch the movie for a minute, captivated by a space battle (Serenity) or wizard battle (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire), or a fat girl (Date Movie) and then lose interest, muttering how he didn't like it.
And if there was a way to entertain him, I would have done it. Even if I put on a baseball game (and yeah, I could have) he'd still rip his flesh, fart and fall asleep (the holy trinity of F's). So why can't I at least be entertained if he's not going to be?
I guess none of this is really exciting, but it's real life. It's not like the movies, where the person suddenly "gets better" for a few magical moments and knows and remembers everyone (my main beef with movies like The Notebook). It's a long slow slide into oblivion, with no brakes.

126 Circling the Drain

Haven't written for a while. Nothing in the news about AD that caught my fancy. I see my dad, but he hardly speaks anymore, so not many amusing anecdotes to relate.
Here's the best of a paltry bunch: I took him to the bird vet with me a few weeks ago. He told the receptionist I was his wife. He started a conversation about one of my birds with someone in the waiting room and continued it with the technician in the exam room as if they were the same person.
My remaining cat, Nutter, has lung cancer, and he's really my focus right now, for the time he has left and I haven't been working on anything else except the novel my friend and I are writing.

---

A couple of weeks ago, my mom took my dad to the doctor to get a new/different prescription for his violent outbursts. I don't remember the name of the drug he prescribed, but he wrote it up for 1.5 mg. When my mom went to fill it, it was only available in 5 mg--nothing smaller. She borrowed my pill splitter and tried giving him half a pill (2.5) which basically just made him almost catatonic.
But the pills have a worse side effect, one that's continuing even though she stopped the drug.
Incontinence.
Maybe it's just a coincidence, who knows. He has been having a problem finding the bathroom at night and peeing in the hallway and dining room. But then my mom found him in the basement, where the cat has his little hideaway, urinating on the floor. She yelled at him to stop, and instead he just let go and peed down his leg, on his pants. When she kept telling him to stop, he simply pooped his pants, right there. I asked, "did he fart and poop came out?" (that' s happened before) and she said no, he closed his eyes and grunted and filled his pants.
As soon as he realized what he had done, he became very upset. My mom cleaned him up, got him clean clothes and thought that was the end of it.
But he did it more than once, including in the bed, and he's also hiding the evidence--she finds "surprises" in the laundry hamper.
He continues to use the bathroom, though. I'm not sure if that's a normal progression or not. It's not something people want to talk about. And he won't wear Depends. I told my mom to just stick a maxipad in his underwear but she said he won't do that either. And now if he's got any poop in his underwear, even just a skid mark, he gets all upset and has to change all his clothes. So he knows it's wrong to have poop in the underpants.
That's all pretty bad, right? Can't suck more than that.
Oh, yes it can.

---

Yesterday, instead of lunch, I had dinner with my parents, because I had a physical therapy appointment. My husband met us there. We had a perfectly nice dinner. Toward the end, my dad had to go to the bathroom. My mom brought him and waited for him. She was gone a long time so my husband went to see if he had to go in the men's room and get my dad, but they were on their way back. My mom said a man came over to her while she was waiting and offered help. I guess his wife had Alzheimer's and he recognized the signs. It's nice that there's people like that in the world. I was at a restaurant recently and I saw a man and his wife and it was clear to me that he had it. Alzheimer's is like a secret club that no one talks about...but when you DO talk about it, you find out almost everyone's a member. And boy are the dues steep.
My husband had to leave, and I stayed with my parents while we finished dessert. The waitress brought the check and my mom handed over her credit card. It came back declined. This started a wave of events that really had to be seen to be believed.
My mom was upset that her card was declined. She had just paid the bill, and she had made purchases on it the day before and that very morning. I didn't have my purse with me and of course my dad doesn't carry a wallet anymore. My mom had no cash. I was debating taking the car back to the house, getting my purse and coming back to pay, but the waitress said they could take an ATM card, which my mom has.
At some point during this discussion, which wasn't very pleasant, my dad snatched the (dead) credit card from my mom and said it was his and refused to give it back. He read her name off it "Ann Shirley Rizza, that's me. This is mine!" He was shouting. We tried to calm him down. "That's not your name, that's not your card, give it back." He started punching my mother. (Remember, this is Friday night rush-hour at 5:30 in a crowded restaurant.)
Usually he responds to me, but to my shock he made what my mom calls the "mean face" (which is this really hideous grimace, primitive, like something a chimpanzee would make) at me and started hitting and punching me. By this time he was out of the booth and in the aisle. Everyone was staring. My mom started crying. All the while my dad was shouting that it's his and he won't give it back. I was trying to get him to come outside with me but he wouldn't come, kept fighting me, punching me, punching my mom when she got up too. The manager came over. He had no clue what to do. My mom begged him to call the police. He wouldn't.
My dad wouldn't let go of the credit card, wouldn't sit back down, wouldn't stop yelling or fighting, wouldn't listen to reason or threats. My mom told me to go and call the police.
So I did.
I called the police on my own father.
I had to say "My father is punching my mother and punching me in the restaurant and you have to come and make him stop." Those are not words I ever in my life thought I would have to say. By then of course I was crying too. It was just so awful, so embarrassing, and I was so angry and hurt and upset.
Not one, but two police cars came, probably in under 2 minutes, sirens on, lights flashing. By that time my mom and the manager had gotten my father to the doorway of the restaurant (I went outside to make my call and wait for the police).
These were not the nice cops who come and find him when he's lost. These were "we have no time for this and we aren't taking your shit" cops.
My father starts babbling, making absolutely no sense, to the cops. My mom and I were trying to explain what happened. Two people were sitting on a bench, waiting for a table, watching and listening. The woman started to laugh, very loud. I just looked at her, thinking "what a rude bitch" but my mom turned on her and started yelling, "it's not funny, he's got Alzheimer's!" The woman said, "I wasn't laughing at you" but she WAS because her and the guy with her weren't having a conversation. They were sitting and watching us. I thought my mom was going to punch this rude bitch right in front of the cops, and wouldn't that have been jolly good fun?
The cops moved the whole thing along--crazy yelling Bob, crying Ann, silent Bert, confused manager, cop1 and cop2.
I would say, conservatively, that it took a half hour to get my dad from the front of the building to the back, where my mom's car was parked. My mom told my dad right out that she was going to tell the cops to bring him to the hospital and she'd leave him there. At some point someone got the damn credit card away from him, I don't know who or when or how. Wasn't me.
The police took a statement from the manager, who really had no clue. He thought we were fighting over the bill. He went back inside, probably to get drunk. Wouldn't blame him. I felt like it and I hardly ever drink.
My mom had parked just about as far away as one can park and not be in the lot for another business. I realized that at the rate the group was moving, it would take an hour to make it to the car. I took the keys and went and got the car. My dad watched me, pointed at me, still yelling, as I got in the car to drive it up a few rows.
I pulled up, realizing that I didn't have my driver's license and I was in front of cops and decided I didn't really give a shit and they weren't going to give me a ticket--just like if you drive your drink friend home and you haven't got a license with you they won't give you a ticket for that.
My father was trying to tell the cops something about how the card was his, and the cop said, "I'll talk to you when you're sitting in the car." He opened the back door, got my father into it with that special cop-move (even though my dad always sits in the front seat, so that upset him). The cop leaned in, put the seatbelt on my dad...and then shut the door over his protests and ignored him. Very neatly done.
The cops took all our information (my mom said, "you've already got a file on us!") and let us go. My mom said, "give me that list, I can't do this anymore."
I said, "neither can I."
I went to my email on her computer and printed out the list of nursing homes.
My dad is only 66 years old.

(BTW, the credit card was shut off because my mom bought a $20 video game online that morning and the bank figured her card had been stolen, even though she had bought video games online before.)