OLD POSTS I CAN'T BEAR TO LOSE, pt. 1

I used to have three blogs, and now I'm going down to one. Well, two. But in going back to read the third blog, about living with an Alzheimer's patient, I realized I didn't want to lose all those stories... So I'm sticking them into a few posts on this blog. HOPE YOU ENJOY!

EVERY DAY IS DIFFERENT HERE (5/13/09)
Betty is very sharp today--walking fairly well, philosphizing about the mythology of God, the innate worthlessness of man, and the supremacy of viruses and insects. She was a sociology professor and still retains her intellect, at least on days like this. She doesn't want to go to the Senior Center, but she missed last Friday and Monday, and needs the physical therapy. And I need her to be gone. She'll do more talking and interacting there than she will here, so I don't feel too guilty about taking her, although she considers it a waste of time and says all anybody does there is watch TV. I think her anti-depressant is working, as is the physical therapy. She hasn't used her walker for days, and although she always looks like she's going to tall over, she hasn't done so in over a week.

Yesterday I took her to Barnes and Noble (her happy place) and left her for about 90 minutes. I was panicked the whole time, but when I came back, she was fine. She had a 2-foot tall stack of books to buy, although she'd previously agreed to settle for three books. I gave in, and it occurred to me that fewer trips is better than lots of trips, and the only way to justify not taking her is to remind her that she just spent $117.

INDEPENDENCE--IT'S NOT EASY (5/21/09)
Betty tried to fix her own lunch a few da ys ago because I was gone. She poured a large can of soup in a china bowl, warmed it in the microwave, then dropped it on the range top. I came home with one hour to prepare dinner for the family, including my mother, whom I'd invited, and found smashed china and thick soup convering the burners and running down the cabinets, and pooling on the floor. Betty was using spatulas and spoons to try to scoop the soup back into another bowl, so she could eat it. I had to show her a piece of broken bowl in her new bowl to convince her this wasn't a good idea. She wanted to help clean up the mess, which she felt terrible about causing, but this would have taken hours. She retreated to her room and had to be coaxed out to eat dinner.

After dinner she couldn't quite remember what had happened, and demanded that my 9-year-old son, who was home at the time, tell her what she had done. "Something is happening to me," she kept repeating. "I don't understand it."

I did a good job of not getting angry at her when I saw the mess, but my husband and daugher were gone, so I had to clean it up myself, and my mother showed up for dinner 45 minutes early, and it was a complete disaster. I WAS angry, but Betty was so upset with herself that I couldn't get mad at her. I tried to reassure her that it was just an accident caused by low blook sugar, and that the only thing she should have done differently was to ask Mikey to help her with the microwave. Mikey came to me later and "confessed" that although he had asked her what she was doing when he saw her with the soup, he let her proceed on her own since she wasn't actually using the stove. She's not allowed since she almost burned down the house with the toaster oven. He felt guilty that he hadn't stepped in to help her, but was torn because he's been told not to act like her babysitter unless he sees her doing something really dangerous. of course, I reassured him that he wasn't at fault, and that the only thing we lost was a can of soup and a dish.

I've had to learn to let my kids try things on their own, even if they end up causing a mess, but I can't do this with Betty. She's not going to get better, not going to retain new skills, and not going to learn from her mistakes. It's a balancing act between not insulting her by treating her like an incompetent, and not tripling my workload by letting her do things for herself.