Year Five of my journal - living with dementia iPad version
Saturday February 1st 20120.
And so we enter our fifth year of living with Alzheimer’s Disease and leave the European Union and I know which affects us most!
To sum up how Pauline is this morning and how Brexit has become an issue to her let me explain. The television news programs are full of all of it and Pauline turns to me while eating her Weetabix and says, “ are we in or out of Europe?” I try to explain the transition process and her response is, “do we still have our Queen then?”
So it is that her memory loss and general confusion manifests itself and I register it as an example of decline and change but, in spite of these changes they are not my main worry at all as her mobility is the priority right now.
Her walking gait is now a shuffle and she needs a walking stick to venture outdoors and when using it her hand and arm shake alarmingly. We have more or less selected our next car having had her sit and exit 5 different cars at four dealerships which has both upset her and annoyed her.
Her sleep pattern, if you can call it a pattern, is also badly disrupted as she spent some three hours asleep in her armchair last night before waking and going to bed. Once there she quickly fell asleep but was awake and restless by 3am having been woken, she says, by more thoughts/dreams of her late son, Grahame, which is why she gets up and watches TV as she tells me this distracts her thoughts of him and helps calm her down.
Finally for this new chapter of our journey is her toilet/bowel issues as, after two or three days of not going, she yet again has the runs and this pattern is constant although her recall of pattern is vague and her belief is she always has the runs and each time blames it on a recent meal or component of the meal such as an egg or particular fruit. So life goes on.
Saturday February 1st 20120.
And so we enter our fifth year of living with Alzheimer’s Disease and leave the European Union and I know which affects us most!
To sum up how Pauline is this morning and how Brexit has become an issue to her let me explain. The television news programs are full of all of it and Pauline turns to me while eating her Weetabix and says, “ are we in or out of Europe?” I try to explain the transition process and her response is, “do we still have our Queen then?”
So it is that her memory loss and general confusion manifests itself and I register it as an example of decline and change but, in spite of these changes they are not my main worry at all as her mobility is the priority right now.
Her walking gait is now a shuffle and she needs a walking stick to venture outdoors and when using it her hand and arm shake alarmingly. We have more or less selected our next car having had her sit and exit 5 different cars at four dealerships which has both upset her and annoyed her.
Her sleep pattern, if you can call it a pattern, is also badly disrupted as she spent some three hours asleep in her armchair last night before waking and going to bed. Once there she quickly fell asleep but was awake and restless by 3am having been woken, she says, by more thoughts/dreams of her late son, Grahame, which is why she gets up and watches TV as she tells me this distracts her thoughts of him and helps calm her down.
Finally for this new chapter of our journey is her toilet/bowel issues as, after two or three days of not going, she yet again has the runs and this pattern is constant although her recall of pattern is vague and her belief is she always has the runs and each time blames it on a recent meal or component of the meal such as an egg or particular fruit. So life goes on.