At the nursing home, Anthony was up and about this afternoon at about the same time he was in bed yesterday. He was lucid, mobile, vocal and quite jaunty.
To me, Dementia resembles the unpredictability of the weather, about which you can do nothing. The other day, a tree was uprooted and fell down during a storm; the next day it poured with rain; the next day it was bright sunshine; and today it is a bit of both.
There is nothing anyone can do about weather fluctuations – nothing. Forecasts can be wrong and often the weather will change drastically from what was expected to something totally different. A storm may shove a sunny day aside and vice versa. And there is nothing you can do about it. Nothing.
Dementia is like this in so many ways. One day, at exactly 10am, Anthony might be able to answer the phone and have a coherent conversation with me; the next day he might be unable to do either. Despite the careful timing of his PDD medications (just like I used to do at home), sometimes he has a huge appetite and other times he has forgotten how to eat. Sometimes he can almost run, using his walker and other times he can’t even take a single step and we have to get the wheelchair.
With over ten years of nursing experience up my sleeve, and a PhD about Alzheimer’s Disease, you would think that I’d have more understanding of the kind of nuances that occur when Dementia has climbed onto the back of another disease like Anthony’s Parkinson’s. And yet, every day is a surprise for me – sometime wonderful, sometimes awful, and sometimes in-between … a bit like the weather.
So what do you do when the weather isn’t what you expected?
You accept it of course, because you have no choice.
[Note to blogger friends: I am still not receiving email notifications of your posts so have been using the WP Reader. This is a much better way for me for the time being but I am not keeping up with you all and I apologize].
