My Children Are Missing!

That was today's theme. Starting at 3:30 - well before my 5:30 "stop working" time. I've been getting good at ignoring the intrusions but today Blanche banged so hard on the doors I thought they would come off the hinges. She tried to tell me her children were missing. I explained where both of her children were at that moment - Tracy at work; and her son Rich in Florida where he lives with his family.

Her response? "No, not those children. My little children." Okay, so I said, "you don't have any little children." "You don't know about them," she responded. I just ended up agreeing with her and walking away. No point in carrying that conversation any further than I needed to, right?

Today, I researched facilities where Blanche can go when the time is right. I personally think the time is right now, but I'm not her daughter. I'm not sure what Tracy's take is on it since we have difficulty discussing it most of the time.

Oops - hold on! Blanche just came over asking if my black cat Purr-Cee is her cat. We told her no, and Tracy asked her why she has a skirt on over her pajamas and Blanche said, "what difference does it make?" Ain't that the truth! What difference does it make? Usually once Blanche takes her night pills and goes over to her apartment, she does not come back. But tonight she was more agitated than usual and she came over twice. The first time she was asking for something to feed her cat. So Tracy went home with her to show her the 24 cans of cat food we had bought her on Sunday and that ended that event. So obviously she is still agitated or she would not have come back over.

Back to the assisted living facilities. I found a handful of places in New Haven County that offer "Memory Care Services". It's all so nice and sanitized. The woman is losing her mind and she seems to have more frequent moments of clarity. At least once a day, she flat out says to me, "I think I'm losing my mind", and I just try to reassure her that her memory is not so good these days. What the hell else am I supposed to tell her? I'm no therapist or counselor, but my take on it is that if her family spent more time with her talking about the past and reminiscing with her, she wouldn't be so agitated as much as she is. The problem is the only family that cares is Tracy and despite her many wonderful qualities, patience is not her strong suit. She has a sister in Connecticut, but if she's in contact with Blanche, I'm not aware of it. Given that she's a nurse and must understand how this illness works, she should be in contact with her sister on a daily basis. But Tracy has really been abandoned by her entire family at this point.

I'm not saying that there's only one way to handle someone with Alzheimer's, but that's personally what I would do if my mom or dad had the illness. My dad has been diagnosed with mild dementia and whenever I go visit them, I try to either bring old pictures for us to look at, or I just I just ask him about how things were when he was young. He has much more clarity when talking about the old days than if you try to ask him how his blood sugar was that day.

Let's end this session with the dream I had last night, well actually this morning. I slept poorly, waking about at least half a dozen times. So I slept in a little longer than usual and that's when I had the dream. My entire family on my mom's side was out our house. Blanche was being unbelievably annoying AND she had super-human strength! She tore the door off between our house and her apartment. Then she went to get a cup of coffee and I apparently yelled at her for something and she threw her coffee mug at me! It clocked me square on the forehead. It was so real that when I woke up, I immediately touched my hand to my forehead, expecting to feel a bump. Finally, in the dream, my mom was there to tell me that Blanche had slammed the coffee pot down on the counter and had broken it. Yikes! What does it all mean?

The Repetition is Maddening!!!

Yes, the repetition is maddening! I think that's the single most difficult part. Blanche doesn't know that between 4:15 and 5:45 today she came back and forth between her apartment and our house 11 times. No really.

The highlight of today was the new drink that Blanche invented. It consists of Diet Pepsi, fat free Half & Half and ice cubes. I tried to stop her but she insisted she drinks that all the time. Tracy was going to make her throw it away, but then we decided it didn't make much of a difference and we simply weren't up for one more argument.

So here we are, it's Tuesday night and I'm sitting in my chair; Tracy and Blanche are sitting on the couch because Blanche once again needed to talk to Tracy. By the time she sat down on the couch, all she could remember was that something was wrong and she needed to talk about it. So we don't know what it is because in the land of the sane, nothing is wrong. It's only wrong in Blanche's world and that my friends is the sadness of it all.

Blanche also said tonight that she needed to run right after dinner because Tracy was coming over to her apartment for dinner. What? Yeah, that's how I feel sometimes - like everyday. The more Blanche talks, the less sense she makes and you try to just carry on a mindless conversation anyway. There is only so much disagreeing, correcting and arguing a person can do in one day. I'm maxed out for today. Hang on while I grab a sip of wine...I drink a lot more at night than I ever used to.

So now the task falls on me to get a list of Alzheimer's facilities and start to call them to set up appointments for Tracy and I to go see. One more thing to add to the unending list.

Sometimes I feel like no one is on my side, but then today the thought struck me that there is one person on my side - Father Time! Father Time is looking out for me and he knows for sure that this too shall pass because everything (and everybody) passes at some point. If he could talk to me I think he would tell me to bide my time because even when I don't realize it, he is in action every single day, bringing Tracy and me one step closer to the freedom we used to have before Blanche moved in with us.

I know that sounds selfish but I challenge anyone out there to walk one mile, or one week, or even one day in our shoes and you will see what I mean. Blanche needs to live somewhere where they will care for her in every regard. There are some days when we are just not nice to her because we cannot take the repetition, the paranoia, the poor hygiene, the intrusiveness and everything else that goes with this illness for one more minute longer.

Even now as I write this, Blanche is talking to Tracy. Blanche says that her daughter Tracy is waiting for her over at her apartment. Tracy is trying to explain to her that she is Tracy and there is no other daughter over in her apartment. So Blanche said, what about my other child? And Tracy said that your other child is Richard and he's in Florida. So Blanche comes back with what about my other little child? Since there is no other little child, that is what Tracy tells her.

So then she asks Tracy, where am I going to sleep tonight? And Tracy says over in your apartment, in your bedroom. And Blanche says okay...and now I'm completely bored with this conversation and I need to go to my happy place for awhile. It's getting harder and harder to get there these days...but I'm counting heavily on my friend Father Time...

The Journey Gets a Little Harder

I haven't written in a while because, well, because I guess I'm not in the routine of writing in a blog yet. "They" say that it takes 21 days of doing something consecutively to make it a part of your routine. I'm not even close yet.

We've had some truly interesting developments. The "sundowning" seems to have subsided somewhat and is not so pronounced in the late afternoons as it used to be. However, Blanche is giving Tracy a harder time with each passing day. Saturday's argument once again centered around showering and it took Tracy a full three hours of arguing to get her mother into the shower! Not an easy task considering Tracy had hours and hours of work to do over the weekend to prepare for a Monday morning meeting.

Blanche has also started just saying words that don't mean anything - either when she tries to put them into a sentence or just speak them individually. I'll try to listen closer and give you an example the next time I blog in.

I did discover an interesting thing. I put up a sign on the doors leading into our house from Blanche's apartment. The sign used to say: "JoAnn is working today. Please do not disturb until after 5:30. Thanks." Now the sign says: "Blanche - I am working today. Please do not bang on the door until after 5:30. Thanks. JoAnn."

The first day I put that new sign up, Blanche did not bang on the door once! She tried to push her way through the door at least a dozen times after her caregiver left at 2 p.m., but she did not bang on the door at all! Go figure. Maybe if I combine the "do not bang" part with the "do not disturb" part, she'll simply read the sign and go back to her apartment. We'll see. I'll keep you posted.

Until next time...JoAnn

The Fella' Who Feeds Me

Mid-afternoon brought the banging on the doors to get into our house. I'm becoming numb to it; it's a slow process of desensitizing myself in this particular situation. I headed downstairs around 4:30, an hour before I should have stopped working, but hopefully I'll be able to last longer once my desensitizing is complete. Today we really engaged in conversation - at least I let Blanche talk and talk she did. She was trying to explain to me that the "fella' who feeds me" isn't doing it all the time or doing it right. I explained her to her that daughter Tracy is the one who does most of the cooking around the house for us, and she gave her standard "that's not what I meant" answer and we were on to the next topic.

But then things took a turn. Blanche became very agitated and told me something was wrong but she couldn't put her finger on it. When she first came over, she was clutching her purse and said she was going to go to "the building one over" to talk to someone. I asked if she meant the house next door and she said yes. I asked her if she knew the Polish couple well enough to go over and talk to them. She said no she didn't, but she did not know what was going on, but she needed to talk to someone. I spent about 10 minutes explaining that everything was fine, it was a perfectly normal day and that she did not have anything to worry about. She told me that everything was normal until someone came and killed her dog. I explained that she did not have a dog, she only had a cat, and if that had really happened, Tracy and I would have known about and we would have done something about it.

That seemed to calm her down so I kept telling her in a conversation-type tone that she did not have anything to worry about and she should just have a seat and read the paper while we waited for Tracy to come home from work.

It's getting harder to explain in writing my conversations with Blanche because they are becoming more and more confusing. Tonight, in order to cope, I'm drinking heavily so I don't feel so sorry for myself because this is what I'm doing on a Friday night! I stumbled on a bucket of frozen strawberry daiquiri's in the freezer downstairs - jackpot! This too shall pass.

The rest of our dinner chat focused on a phone "conversation" Blanche had today with her mother. (Yes, you are correct - her mother has been gone for many years). That lead us into a conversation about children, phone calls during dinner and her late husband making faces whenever his mother called them during dinner. Keep in mind that I translate much of this for your reading pleasure because Blanche never actually uses names or identifies people. It's more "he was on the phone making faces" type of thing and I try to guess who she is talking about. A little more alcohol and this could actually be fun for me.

Next, Blanche headed over to her apartment and came back about five minutes later. She informed me that her son was over in her apartment and she just wanted to check and make sure he was okay. I had to cal her on this one, so we went back over to look through her apartment and guess what - her son who lives in Florida was not there! Surprise, surprise...

Well, unless she comes back over tonight, I guess that's it for today. If anyone ever reads this, I hope you get something out of it. Learn how to talk to someone suffering from Alzheimer's. Understand that we cannot imagine in our wildest dreams what they are going through. Little pieces of Blanche's mind are slowly being destroyed. Words are disappearing; people are disappearing (or re-appearing); an apartment empty except for a cat is turning into Grand Central Station with any number of people passing through each day and I envision her brain as one big knot that can no longer untangle even the simplest thing.

I hope that I never again know anyone with this horrific affliction. Bye for now.

It's a Great Day!

From an Alzheimer's perspective, today was a great day! Blanche started to bang on the door between her apartment and our house at around 3:30, but Tracy was coming to pick her up at 4-ish to take her for a flu shot, so the banging did not last very long. When they came home, we had dinner together and Blanche said goodnight. Saying goodnight and leaving immediately after dinner has become her new MO, which is really okay with us.

So, that's it for tonight!

Mixing Drinks...

So today's new thing: Blanche attempted to mix her Citrus flavored diet soda with fat free half and half! When I stopped her, she said she drinks it like that all the time. But I stopped her anyway because I was just thinking that cannot possibly taste good. We also went around a few times about the guys that are after her cat. These guys do not exist. It's a part of Alzheimer's called "sundowning", and as the name suggests, when the sun starts to go down, the paranoia about these guys increases. No matter what we say or do, Blanche insists we do not know what is going on over at her place. Can you say frustrating?

And our last back and forth of the afternoon involved me asking Blanche repeatedly to take a shower and wash her hair and her telling me she already did, even though her hair was very dirty. The first time she went over to her place, she came back in 4.5 minutes (I timed it), and told me she had showered and washed her hair. I asked if she actually washed it or just wet it. She admitted she only wet it. Then she asked me if she could use our downstairs bathroom and I told her no and that she had to go home and take her shower in her own house in her beautiful walk-in shower. She said she did not know that she had a walk-in shower and she toddled back to her house for the sixth time in about 20 minutes.

And at the end of the day, when Tracy came home, she had to walk Blanche over to her house and escort her into the shower in order to get her body washed and her hair cleaned. So all my efforts were for naught. One of these days, I'll figure it out. I always feel like in the moment I can make a difference. But I can't and I need to accept that and stop wasting my time.

The final event for today - Blanche picked up her night-time pill case and told me she had a broken nail and she wanted to use the pill case to fix it. So, I took the pill case from her and gave her an emery board. She used that instead, surprise, it worked better!

That's one of the things about trying to help people with Alzheimer's. It's easy to lose sight of the fact that people afflicted with this illness are still human. I find myself becoming very detached and saying things to Blanche that I normally would not say to someone not suffering from this illness. I also talk to her exactly like I would to a child. I also have started to desensitize myself to her situation and that's not good either. I need to have more patience, not less, because the situation is not going to get easier any time soon. I am optimistic that writing this daily blog will help me get things off my chest and allow me to cope better.

Thanks for reading. Until next time...

How it all Began...

2006 - it seemed like a no-brainer at the time. My partner's mom, who was widowed and living in Florida, had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's. It was clear that she could not continue to live alone so Tracy (my partner) decided it was best to discuss the situation with her brother, who lived about 20 minutes away from their mom in Florida. The decision was to sell Blanche's townhouse and split the money between them. They would each build an addition on their houses - his in Florida and ours in Connecticut. Blanche would live six months of the year with us; and the warmer six months with her son, daughter-in-law and two granddaughters.

This idea survived for about two weeks. Tracy received an email from her sister-in-law saying that she did not think it was a good idea for Blanche to live with them as she would be too "isolated". Right - with her son, daughter-in-law and two granddaughters. So, we stepped up and put a 640-square-foot addition on our house. It is a complete in-law apartment and is really very nice. So in August 2006, Tracy went to Florida, packed up the contents of the house and put them on a moving truck, loaded her mom and Cleo, the cat into her mom's car and drove to Connecticut.

From that point forward, the journey has been much more difficult than either of us could have imagined. We were warned by some family and some friends that what we were planning was a bad idea. But we know even today, that it was the right thing to do. Blanche was not ready for an assisted living facility in 2006. She was still driving and was highly functional. I will now try to add to this blog on a daily basis for two reasons - maintaining my sanity, and maybe giving some insight to others who are just beginning the same journey.