It’s been a weird, crazy, wonderful week. Happy Valentines Day. Overall we had a good day. I brought Carolyn a spray of red roses this morning and she smiled as several of the staff took photos.
I couldn’t find a suitable vase for the tall stemmed roses, so I made a quick trip to the store and bought a big glass pitcher, which looked good under the roses, and looked sturdy, too. When the roses fade and wilt away, we can use the pitcher for drinks in the summer.
During the Valentines Day party that Featherstone put on this afternoon, Carolyn got drowsy and I couldn’t wake her up for pictures. So I wheeled her back to her room, put on the footrests so I could sit her up straight, and gave her just one of the roses from the bouquet to hold. When I got back to the lobby, she was awake, and we got a couple of pictures taken.
The really strange day was yesterday. The day before she slept all day. Yesterday she woke up wide awake and wanted to talk. She was speaking in whole sentences part of the time, and the words were clear and not gibberish. I called up our son Wes and asked him if he’d like to talk to his mother, and they talked for over a half hour. As he asked questions, she was answering them, and making good sense a lot of the time. He was as amazed as I was.
I have to wonder when I read about the permanent damage that Alzheimer’s causes to your brain, and that may be true at the end, but these “breakthrough” days tell me that the thoughts and memories are still in there, they are just blocked by something. And sometimes a piece of the blockage falls away for a day or two, and she recovers some of her old self again.
Later in the after noon, we were in her room, just the two of us, and she still was talking to me and trying to make me understand what she was feeling. She becomes aware of her condition, and a profound sadness comes over her face, and she cries as she tells me of her fears for the future. Her mother had the same disease, and she knows what is in store for us.
All I am able to do, beside hugging her and crying with her, is constantly reassuring her that I will never leave her alone, that I will always be here for her and trying to make her as happy and comfortable as possible. Sometimes she smiles when I tell her, “It’s just you and me, Babe!”
She was trying to get me to understand something, and I wasn’t picking up her meaning, and I could see she was getting frustrated and mad, so I asked, “I think you are tired of looking at me, Do you want me to go away for awhile?”
She blurted out, “Yeah!”
As I stood to leave the room, she loudly said, “No, that’s not what I wanted to say at all! I don’t know why I said that!”
So I got to sit back down, hold both of her hands, look her in the eyes and say, “Don’t worry about it. It’s all right. I still love you—that’s all we need to understand right now.”
After six o’clock we stopped and had a little glass of wine, and then I tucked her into bed, propping her legs up so her heels don’t touch the mattress. She has pressure sore on both heels from many days of lying in bed on her back. We are hoping to get them healed without any infection problems.
She was sleeping soundly when I left her.
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