Dad Has Dementia

While Moe was improving our land and I was enjoying winter, dad was struggling. I had wondered if he really knew what he was doing, moving up to Snowflake, but in the end I couldn't have been happier because it opened the door for us to move there, too.

“It's not as easy as I thought,” dad confided to Moe the first Sunday they went to meetings together. “Everyone's real nice, but it's hard getting to know people at my age.”

Not long after dad told me, “I just can't remember people's names anymore.  Every Sunday I meet new people, but when I introduce myself they tell me we met last week. I just can't remember.”

I commiserated with dad. I'd always had a terrible time remembering people, myself. Still, it did seem that dad was having a tougher time than normal. He'd always worked hard to remember people and call them by name, it was one of the reasons everyone liked him so much.

Both dad's mother and father had developed dementia before they passed away, his mother suffering especially bad, and it was something dad worried about.

“If I ever get that way,” he had told me once when I was a teenager, “I want you to take me out and drown me in a canal.”

He was teasing, of course, but dad really did hate knowing that someday he might loose his memory and be a burden on us.

For Christmas that first year in Snowflake, I found a hand-held electronic game designed to strengthen one's memory. I hoped dad wouldn't be offended when I gave it to him, and he seemed genuinely excited about using it, but he never did. Perhaps it was too complicated to figure out how the game worked, like how child protective caps sometimes defeat thier own purpose.

Still, for the most part, mom and dad seemed to enjoy living in Snowflake, at least until dad slipped on the ice, causing a brain hemorrhage.

“It was a miracle,” the surgeon at Barrow's Medical Institute assured mom when they discovered his injury had healed itself, but even though they released him and sent him home with a clean bill of health he didn't seem to recover.

At first Dad had bad headaches and couldn't move his leg. He had another CAT scan to see what was wrong, but they couldn't find anything. Dad was also lethargic, just sitting in his chair, doing nothing. That was so different from his normal behavior that it scared mom and worried all of us. My dad never sat down. All of his life he had worked hard, never stopping until it was time to go to bed. For dad, vacations meant time when he could work on something else, not when he stopped.

I tried to think of ways to pull dad out of his reverie and get him interested in something. One day I took a nursery catalog with me when I went to visit, hoping to get dad's advice on what kind of trees I should plant up at our place. I hoped I could get him interested in a new project, but it didn't work, and he seemed to have a hard time following what I was saying. Still, it gave him something to think about for a few minutes.

The following day I brought a game of checkers and tried to get dad to play with me. He tried, a little, but mom made most of the moves for him.

Then I tried playing War with dad, thinking it was so simple he would be able to keep up, but he really wasn't interested.

A few days later I took mom and dad to Wal Mart.  Dad got around alright, but was worn out long before mom was ready to stop. She, on the other hand, seemed to be holding her own a little better. Perhaps the medicine was helping her pulmonary hypertension, perhaps we were just so worried about dad we didn't realize how sick mom was.

Mom's feet had always bothered her, and she had surgery on them in April.  My sister, Linda, and I spent the day at the hospital with dad while mom was being operated on.  He did OK, but looked around in confusion every now and then and asked us where mom was?

A couple of days later I took dad to the hospital to have some tests done. They thought maybe he was having seizures or something, a left-over complication from his brain injury. That wasn't the problem. Next they tried giving him a pace-maker. Dad's blood pressure had always been low, but now it seemed dangerously so, and his pulse would sometimes fall to just thirty beats a minute. Maybe he wasn't getting enough oxygen to his brain?  It didn't seem to help, though. 

On May fifteenth, just one year after dad moved mom to Snowflake so she could get the best health-care possible and stay with him at least ten more years, my brother-in law called and asked me to come over to his house to talk to him.

“Dad has dementia,” Alan began slowly, apologetically, as if it was his fault. “His brain injury acerbated it, but it's probably been coming on for awhile. Because dad is so smart, he's been unconsciously compensating for his lapses, so we didn't recognize what was happening.  Dementia usually comes on so slowly people don't realize they are getting sick. It's like juggling a bunch of balls. For a long time dad has been able to keep all the balls in the air, but the fall he took back in February made him drop them, and now he can't get them back up again.”

I looked at Alan sadly. I was amazed to hear what he was saying, but not surprised. The signs had been there all spring, I guess. I just needed a doctor to actually say the words.

“The difference between dad and other people is that most of them deteriorate slowly, over a matter of years,” Alan continued slowly, “but Dad is going down hill so quickly, I think he will probably pass away before the end of the year.”

Now, that was a shock! I hated hearing what my brother-in-law was saying, but in my heart I couldn't help thinking what a great blessing it would be for dad if he really did pass that quickly. Perhaps this was Heavenly Father's way of rewarding him for the good life he had lived. But oh, how wrong it felt!