Alzheimer’s is a bitch.
My mom’s mind is not totally gone yet, but it’s going. She still remembers my name and my father’s
and my sisters’. She knows we’re related
to her but the whole son, mother, daughter, husband dynamic may be beyond her
reach. My family
all take shifts so he is never alone. One of the worst parts of the disease for me is
she forgets to go to the bathroom.
Sometimes we help her in the bathroom just in time for her to pee or
poop. Usually she just pees or craps in
her diaper and we have to help her clean up later.
She always resists when one of us tries to get her in the
bathroom. She cries, “No!” and screams
like a baby with her mouth open. Most of
her teeth are gone which is ironic because she used to be very stylish, maybe
even a little vain. The woman she used
to be would have cringed if she could have looked into the future and saw what
she would become. But now she doesn’t
care: her teeth, her hair, her urine, it’s all good. She’s in another place.
The family does our best to keep her clean and neat, but after an hour getting
her to go to the bathroom, some of the finer points of hygiene seem to recede
in value.
I go and sit with my mother four to six hours every weekend
while my dad goes out and runs errands and clears his head from taking care of
my mom. One of my sisters watches mom
during the week while my dad works. He’s
83 and still working. I think it keeps
him young and healthy. My other sister
goes over one afternoon and one evening.
Another cousin helps out a couple of evenings a week when my dad works
late. Everyone wants to keep her at home
as long as possible. My sisters are
better with her hair and nails then I am.
I specialize with toileting assistance.
One of the first times I helped her use the toilet I was
trying to help her wipe afterward and the fact that I was her son hit her. Not in the crazy baby scream voice that she
used at the beginning of the procedure, but in a more aware, shame filled
voice, she tried to push my hands away and told me, “No, no, stop. I don’t want you to do that.”
I said, “I don’t want to do it either, but it’s got to be
done” and finished the job.
When I’m helping her clean up after toileting, it’s weird to
think that’s the vulva I came into the world from. I never heard my mother use the word
vulva. She was the kind of lady who would
have told me the stork brought me if she thought she could still get away with
that in the mid sixties when I was a little boy.
After toileting she goes back to her chair. My father got her one of those fancy
recliners that also push you up when you’re ready to stand. My mom is never ready to stand when we have
to take her to the bathroom. As we push
the controller to make the chair goes up she screams, “No!” Then, when directed, she puts on her slippers
with help and walks to the bathroom. She
used to have a cane, but we took it away because she would swing it around and
try to hit everyone with it so. Now, she
has a walker. She doesn’t like to use it
as much as the cane. It’s too heavy and
awkward to pick up and hit anyone with.
Most of her teeth on the top are missing except for one that
is slightly protruding in front.
Before she got sick, she took good care of her teeth. She had all her own teeth until Alzheimer’s
hit. Then she started to lose them quickly. Her old dentist had retired by that point and
she remembered enough to remember she didn’t like my father’s dentist so she
started to get her teeth pulled at my dentist’s office. It was kind of embarrassing to take her to
this place where they just knew me as a cool dad, but it gave me a kind of
strength to do that too. This is my
mother, dammit. We did take her cane
away before she went in the dentist office.
After we got all the rotten teeth out of her mouth, we had
her fitted for dentures. It was hard to
get her not to bite the dentist when he was measuring her mouth. She usually
asked him first, “Should I bite you?” He
always answered in the negative, but sometimes she tried anyway. My job was to kneel next to the chair and if I
couldn’t stop her, to pry her mouth open before she did any damage. The dentist never got pissed, although he
clearly didn’t enjoy it. He works with a
lot of children and was probably used to unruly patients. On one of my individual visits, he told me
his mother was starting to get symptoms.
That’s the most he ever shared with me about his life.
So we finally got her fitted and she looked great in her new
dentures. This was during the time when
the family would leave her home for an hour or two alone. She only left the condo once in many hours of
being alone. Since she and my dad live
on the second floor of a senior condo building the chances of her getting
totally outside with no one seeing her were minimal. Regardless, we stopped leaving her alone
after that. Even before that we had stop leaving her alone much because
every once a while another resident burns something on their stove and this
amazingly loud fire alarm goes off throughout the building. The place is independent living, but when the
alarm goes off a staff person from downstairs goes to that condo and can usually
get the alarm to go off by opening a window and fanning the smoke out. The situation doesn’t seem dangerous fire
wise but that alarm scares the bejeezus out of my mother.
The alarm makes her more upset than anything I’ve seen since
she’s gotten sick. She curses A LOT and
looks very panicked when the alarm sounds. It’s not a good scene
even a family member is with her. It's painful to contemplate how freaked she would get if the
alarm went off when she was alone. One time when it went off the fire department
came and all the residents had to leave their apartments. I wasn’t there, but my sister said when she
led our mom out they walked past a fire fighter and mom cursed him right the
fuck out, really loudly. Bet that made
his day, old lady cursing him out.
So that day coming from the dentist my sister took our mom
upstairs with her new dentures in and left her for an hour until my dad came
home. When he got home the dentures were
gone, totally missing, not in her mouth, not anywhere else. We all looked everywhere we could imagine and they never turned up. Another
Alzheimer’s mystery. That was a year ago.
I think dentures were too big to flush, but it’s like $1200 down the
toilet. That’s why she has the tooth
sticking out in front.
