Relative Calm

There's a pun in that title somewhere.  But speaking directly...

We're having a quieter stretch.  They're rare, and they're always welcome.

Yesterday we got him over to see Dr. L, the dermatologist.  The adventures were small-scale.  On Friday the office called my father (not me) to confirm the appointment.  Of course he told them it wasn't necessary -- Dr. R had said he was fine.  So, a flurry of Monday-morning phone calls -- was the appointment still on?  Thankfully, yes -- unlike others, they hadn't taken him at his word.  E got him there, Dr. L took care of the worst of the scalp growths, and then E got him home in time for him to see the Mets' opener.  There'll be a follow-up next Monday to deal with one of the more stubborn lesions, and then with luck we'll be done with this particular episode.

E seems to be rising to the occasion.  Maybe the problem was that she was under-occupied.  Now that she's been tasked with bathing him and getting him over to doctor country, things seem better.  And she seems happier.  Could be a lesson in that.  My father is thrilled with her and insists on giving her a  raise -- I understand the impulse, but there are limits.  I'll have to reason with him about it over dinner tonight.

Tomorrow he'll have a visit from his cousins -- Harriet, 92, tack-sharp, and Arthur, 83, in between episodes of touring the world with his girlfriend.  They'd lost touch with each other in the late 1940's.  Then Arthur (a Manhattan-project veteran -- he helped design the triggering mechanisms) rediscovered my father while searching for lost family on the Internet.  I won't be there, but E will be on hand to make sure that they all enjoy themselves and nobody chokes.  I'm sorry to miss it.  I'm always brought up short when I meet elderly people who have all their faculties about them.  I know there are many people like that -- but not as an everyday thing in my reality.

I'm playing a slow game of phone tag with the lawyers.  I should really be pressing them about the status of the medical side of the Medicaid application.  But once I hear from them I'll have a new set of tasks.  And right now I don't.  Which for today at least is OK by me.

It can be pleasant here in the nice amorphous space between the last events and the next ones.

Comments

[julie e]

Hi,glad to hear you are getting a little calm time to shore
up for the next big wave. It sounds like you come from a
family of doers and thinkers so it must be extra hard to come
to terms with your fathers decline.
Does it seem to you that people begin this with losing the thing
that seemed most important or is that just where it becomes
noticed first? My husband was a banker and real estate developer
in California and the first thing to go was his ability to handle
finances and numbers. Could that part of the brain have been over
stimulated? Not likely since they say the more you exercise your
brain the better. Maybe it's more difficult to deal with losing those abilities and causes more anger and frustration
than other areas of loss.
I find it interesting that he too has a lot of skin problems
and must go to the dermatologist for removal of precancerous
spots and growths. Probably that has more to do with living
in CA and too much sun than it does with AD. It seems our
social life consists of Dr. appointments.
I look forward to your next posting.

[Alan G. Ampolsk]

Interesting thoughts about brain activity and what gets damaged first. I suppose that in my father's case I could make a similar connection -- he was a writer and editor, and his first noticeable problems were word-related. He had difficulty rememembering names, then nouns. But I'm not sure there's anything causal going on there. Word-choice problems affect a lot of people -- as do problems with numbers. I doubt that maps neatly to what they did in life -- I'm sure there are bankers who have verbal problems and writers who have problems with numbers (which came second in my father's case). I think you're onto something when you suggest that the problem that stands out is the one you notice first -- and that might have something to do with an area where the person used to be capable. Words mattered to my father, so when he started getting things wrong, it stood out. Numbers seemed to have played the same role in your husband's case. I sometimes wonder, though, if there weren't earlier signs (behavioral? mood-related?) that we missed.

The challenge is that the disease involves the whole cortex, which means there's a world of stuff to go wrong. Some big capability or other (words, numbers, visual processing, spatial reasoning) is likely to go down first and when it does, it gets our attention.

As to the skin problems, I gather that's more age- and lifestyle-related than Alzheimer's-related. Though there's always the chance that some new back-door connection will turn up.

I hear you about doctors' appointments -- I live in a world of helping professionals myself...