Thursday, April 19, 2007

122 so sad

My mom found a piece of paper on my dad's end table. He writes himself a lot of notes--I saw one where he had written my mom's name in big letters and propped it up so he could see it. Yet he still calls her "hey." He has other ones with his address and birthday.
The note she found made her cry and when she told me about it made me cry too. If I can find out the full text I will. But basically my dad had written "My name is Bob Rizza. I am 66 years old. I can't drive a car. I can't talk. I can't remember anything." It continued with a list of other things he can't do anymore.
How can ANYONE make jokes about how when you have Alzheimer's you make new friends every day and it doesn't matter because the person with AD can't remember he has it, etc. My father knows.
How fucking sad is that note? And he wrote it to REMIND HIMSELF that he doesn't know anything. It wasn't addressed to anyone.

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

121 news: Alzheimer's patient and dead rat

I have no idea of the truth of this story (you know the Internet), but it's been everywhere the last couple of days. There's a germ of truth in everything, so I wonder what it is in this case?
Hmm. Remember my last post, about running nursing homes for profit?
Melody Chatelle, a spokeswoman for Sunwest Management Inc., the Oregon-based company that operates Paragon, denied the allegations....Chatelle said that Bock was found holding a glue trap that had been placed in his room by a pest control company to catch a single field mouse. She said the dead field mouse was inside the trap when Bock picked it up.
So how did it get from the trap into his mouth if that is the truth? I can see how it changed from a mouse to a rat in the telling (a dead rat stuffed into your mouth is so much more impressive than a dead mouse...although it must have been a very small rat or he had a very big mouth).
Bock's attorney... said two traps were placed in Bock's room and both were laced with poison, not glue....Paragon records show a staff person noticed Bock "playing with a rat in his room and eating candy ... with the rat".... A short time later...paramedics called to the scene noted "possible ingestion of rat poison" in their report and an emergency room file says that Bock was "found in room in care facility with dead rat in mouth."
Obviously he thought the rat was some kind of pet. But that still doesn't explain how it got into his mouth. I assume it died because it ate the poison. Can a person with AD be so far gone he'd stuff a dead/dying rat into his mouth? Would such a person be capable of playing with a rat and eating candy with it? Seems like two different levels of functioning to me.

As far as my dad goes, his anti-anxiety medicine has been tripled AND he's on the "real" medicine now as part of the study (all this time he's gotten the placebo). He seems a bit improved. He's better at puzzles. He seems to be farting less often and less loudly. He still picks incessantly at his hands, ripping off the skin and then licking at the wound. Because of the blood thinners, sometimes he really starts bleeding. We all (semi-automatically) say "Don't pick," and touch his hands to get his attention, but after a moment he's back to digging away and licking. The licking bothers me more than the digging--there's something so primal about it.
His OCD seems slightly better. At lunch on Friday, he dropped something on the floor and didn't care, unlike the time at the other place where he fixated on the dropped paper. Yesterday I saw him pick up every crumb and piece of lint from the carpet and put it all in a pile on the coffee table. My mom inadvertently knocked the pile back onto the carpet. He picked some of it back up, but not all, and my mom threw it away, and he seemed to lose interest. But then I saw him picking up various papers and magazines and hiding them under the couch cushions. He did it so quickly and so casually that if I hadn't been sitting right there I never would have noticed. He had a different bunch of magazines in plastic bags that he was trying to show me on Easter but no one could understand WHAT about the magazines was important, why he had them in individual bags or what he wanted to show me.
He still gets excited out of proportion, especially when it comes to anything concerning the car. If my mom hits a bump or hole in the road, he winces and says "ooh" loudly (even if the car barely moves) and he's still a little nuts about her parking far away from the door wherever they go (which was always his thing) and parking exactly between the lines.
He wears a ratty old hand-knitted green hat all the time, inside the house and out. Often in the house he'll have his winter coat on (on top of the 3 or 4 shirts he's wearing, and his fleece with the pockets bulging with special things he likes to carry everywhere). One night we let the dog sleep on his coat on a chair at the table while doing a puzzle. He came in, saw the dog sleeping on his coat, made me put the dog on the floor and then put his coat on. I swear it was because he didn't want the dog on the coat!
The dog is getting fat. He's not as fat as our last dachshund, but he's still chunkier than he should be. When we got him in June, he was thin and his ribs showed. (Too thin, but he'd been on the run for who knows how long.) Now he's got blubber. My mom says my dad feeds him all the time, whenever my dad has food the dog has some too. She's stopped feeding him wet food (due to the pet recall), which makes up for some of the calories, but he's still getting blobby. I am concerned because we don't know his medicine history (other than the injuries he had when we got him and the obvious scars on his body) and we don't know how his back will do with all that weight on it. Anyway, back to my dad, this isn't my pets blog.
His speech hasn't improved. When he wants something he's just as likely to point to it and say "that". We gently tell him the name. "Corn. Here you go." But it doesn't "stick". I noticed when I was there the other day he's got my mom's name written on a piece of paper next to where he sits. He never uses it, though, always calling her "hey" and grabbing her arm. I'm "hey" and an arm-grab too. For some reason he remembers my grandma's name sometimes, though. He never grabs her arm or calls her "hey". The cat and dog are both "baby", as are any of my birds he comes in contact with. He asks if every bird is the "original" one (meaning the one I've had for over 18 years) so he does remember that much.