Preparing for Alzheimer's

Maybe this should have gone on the Provident Living blog.

I know I have blogged before about how all of my aunts watched The Bold and the Beautiful, but I don't think I mentioned that they and my uncles also all did the crossword every day. It took Mom's illness for me to realize that was probably at least partially a response to seeing their own mother succumb to dementia. That was their way of fighting it.

And one of them got it anyway. I don't know. Maybe two out of six siblings isn't bad.

My mother never did crosswords. She had never really enjoyed reading or puzzles or anything like that. Her thing was being a wife and mother. That involved a lot of cleaning that she was great at. When she started working it was at housekeeping and janitorial, so a natural extension of what was familiar.

I wish sometimes that it had been different. Back in the early 90s there had been some discussion about her training to become a CNA, after a friend did it. I wonder if that would have changed things or given her more time. If she had started doing the crossword, would that have helped? What if she had started reading romance novels like some of my friends' mothers? I'm not even saying the smutty ones. It's still reading.

Probably some changes wouldn't have hurt. There is a lot of information out there on keeping your brain young and avoiding brain fog. With her having it, though, there are some things that I especially wish.

I wish she'd had some kind of tactile hobby, like crocheting or drawing or playing the piano. I wish there was something with a lot of muscle memory involved that could keep her busy and bring her some satisfaction now. The cleaning was the biggest thing for a while, but a woman who could clean two houses plus her own every day and then offices at night, well one house isn't that much of a challenge for her, even before she started losing some of her abilities there. I wish we'd had something else.

I wish we had taken better care of her joints. For one, when she was cleaning houses by day and buildings by night, it beat up her body a lot. (Though the friend who became a CNA really messed up her back while attempting to help one patient, so there are always risks.) In addition, while Mom was resisting the surgery she held her knees stiffly a lot, and the knee replacement fixed a lot of the pain, but not the stiffness. Of course, we never could have afforded the surgery before she was on Medicare, but they had gotten really bad a few years before. Greater mobility could help with greater activity, and that is valuable on many levels.

There's one other thing that I know we could never have pulled off, but it would have helped.

I read a story about a couple who nicknamed the dementia when the husband started getting it but was still aware. It became a joke for them, and a way of being lighthearted about it.

That's why I don't think we could have done it; Mom hated her diagnosis too much to find any humor. However, I think there will be times for that couple when it is not just that he forgets something, but he is starting to believe something not true, and the reference to "Ollie" will help him believe her. Eventually that will stop helping too, but I would take any extra help we could get.