Can it be spring?

It's another beautiful day in Michigan!  Where's the snow?  Not that I'm complaining!  The sun is shining, the temperature is wonderful.  The wind is blowing like crazy.  All the pear trees are in bloom, as are the forsythia and the daffodils.   The lilies are growing like crazy and the shoots on the roses are 4" long.  Crazy weather.

I try to take advantage of K's ocd to the best of my ability to steer him toward healthy activity.  But some times it really backfires on me.  Today, for instance.  We've been walking and he really enjoys walking to the end of the sidewalk in front of our house.  If only he could.  When the announcement comes, "Okay, dear, I'm going for a walk,"  I know we are in for an hour or more of him going out, coming in to tell me "That's not going to work," going back out telling me "Okay, dear, I'm going for a walk,"  and coming right back in to say "That's........"  You get the idea. An hour later, he might have been able to take a 10 minute walk.  When I go with him, we walk together to the end of the walk, but when we get back, he starts his routine again.  Also, he gives me the traffic report on each round.  I always hated the kids coming in and out of the house - this is much worse!  The spring on our 4 year old garage door broke last year.  The repairman was mystified - I wasn't!

When I saw Dianne, my counselor,  Monday, we were talking about how the repetitive nature of K's behavior can be intolerable at times.  I know everyone else gets tired of the same story over and over, but I hear those stories 20-30-40 times a day.  Which thrown in with the walks, the traffic and the reports each time a female with a bouncing pony tail comes by, (the Track team is training right now, oh joy) it is enough to drive me crazy.  But,  I'm not.  I've never been a terribly patient person.  Okay, okay, I hear you laughing!  But, somehow, from somewhere, I find the strength to be patient and really not so bothered most of the time.  I know where that strength comes from and I thank God every day because I know that on my own I could never do this.

Dianne said something pretty profound this week.  We were discussing K's new vanity and his heroic stories in which he is the star.  Basically she said that at the end of our lives we all look back at our lives - our regrets and our failures as well as our accomplishments and successes.  In K's case, his brain is dieing even though he is still physically strong.  But without the frontal lobe filters, rather than regrets, he remembers his past as he wished it would have been.  Although I understand this, it makes me sad.  In his own right, K was heroic.  He (and his brothers) overcame a disadvantaged childhood many could not.  He joined the Marines during the Vietnam War and did what he felt was his duty as a citizen.   He never fell for Timothy Leary's turn on, tune in, drop out retoric.   When he completed his time with the Marines, he put himself through college with the GI bill, earning a degree in microbiology.   He worked several different jobs early on.  When I met him, he had just gotten a job with Ford Motor Co at the glass plant.  Within a few years he worked his way up from taking EPA samples, sitting on top of the stack all day and then processing the samples, to being a manager in the fabrication building where tempered car windows were made.  At that point, he hit the glass ceiling - he had advanced as far as he could without an engineering degree.  He left Ford and went to work for a competitor, but within a year, we were back in Tulsa because they realized that it was his expertise that had kept the presses running and he was desperately needed.  He crashed through the glass ceiling. and continued to advance throughout his career.  K did more than he had ever expected he would when he was a young Marine.  I'd say his brothers could say the same about themselves.  Those were all highly intelligent young men.  I know now that his Mom probably was already started down this path of dementia before I met her.  I wish I had known her earlier.  She must have been a hell of a mother.  I knew his Dad longer - he was a quiet spoken man much like his sons.  I know that he was a hard worker.  And I know his son.  That's enough for me to understand the quality of people they were.

It does make me sad sometimes that there are people in our lives now who never knew him before this disease started changing him.

Another idea Dianne and I came up with was to get him to start journaling orally some of his stories.  We thought that it might give me a little break from his storytelling if he was busy doing this.  Another back fire!  He has recorded one story so far and he loves it!  So much so that he will sit and play it over and over and over for me.....I tried to get him to plug in the earphones so he could hear it better (and I couldn't hear it at all).  But he figured that out pretty quickly -"But then you can't hear it!"  Don'cha know!!!

My DD sent me a wonderful book this past week, Dementia Caregivers Share Their Stories, A Support Group in a Book.  I'll probably share some of it with you next time.  I found this bit to be so helpful:  "Caregivers need permission to be human and fallible.  When we make mistakes during out caregiving
Thanks, DD,  for a book that is bound to be a great comfort and resource!  Thanks, I needed that!

Peace and love, Mary