Alz Heimers and his friend Bob are now inseperable

For those who are regular readers on this blog, you know about the funnier side of Alzheimers from earlier blog posts about my father, who is now just Bob, and there is no longer a funnier side to Alzheimers – we stopped laughing a while ago.
I’m sitting in the quiet, music playing softly and the only reason it’s quiet is because Bob is sleeping – he will be up in a few hours, but then I don’t need to deal with him until morning – my mother always does.
When he is awake he is constantly in and out of my office, seeking reassurance or needing to make some sense of something that has no sense. It’s been tough. Especially when the neurons are firing and so the questions are there but they are going nowhere, don’t make sense and frustrate the people involved.
I was away recently, as you no doubt know, on a 7 week project in the Western Cape. Now previously when I had been away it would take a few days of grilling my mom on who I was and how I fit into the picture and then he would be fine. As we know, he started losing his links to memories and confused things like gender and nouns but it was still making some kind of sense.
When I arrived back roughly two weeks ago, things had changed drastically. My return threw him totally and Bob still doesn’t relate to me. Today, as I left him standing waiting for my mother in Pick ‘n Pay he said, “Go well Bud, take care of yourself.” like he would do with the strangers he has been conversing with in the last months. In his head I am just someone staying there, and he keeps asking where “the other one” is and then sometimes he asks me when I’m going home, so I don’t really know what he thinks. In his head he has split me into two people, a male and a female but there is no familial link – that is gone. His family (siblings that are still alive) has disappeared and he doesn’t know who anyone is, including his wife. He has also split her into two – his first wife and ‘this one’ or ‘my partner’. The severity and swift progression of his disease still hadn’t sunk in – even though I was witness to so many convincing and irrefutable incidents.
My partner keeps reminding me that his mind is that of a 3 year old and I need to treat him as such. Hard when you are faced with this 70-year old adult who is arguing, fighting and getting aggressive about wanting to drive the car on a main motorway but tries to open the car door with the house key and thinks the hooter is the telephone or method he can contact his first wife with. I am grateful I have someone in my life who keeps sanity intact when I and all around me are losing it from moment to moment.
That was the incident this morning – trying to convey sense to a brain where the neurons no longer connect and he was having none of it. He was convinced we (my mom and I) were ganging up against him and that we should phone Sue (my mother) who would tell us that he had a license and could drive and so he will …” and it’s my car!” he snarled with so much venom that I was taken aback, then angry and then resigned.
It’s been a day of it. I lie. It’s been a week of it, two weeks of it – this morning however clarity had crystal transparency. Dad is gone, Bob is here and the two are not the same person – so here I am assigning two people to one vessel, how is that for ironic?
I am asking myself now, as I sit here, with tears welling – a lot of it feeling sorry for Bob (being trapped in a broken mind must be terrifying!) and hoping that his moments of lucidity are no longer there. A lot of it, feeling sorry for my mom who is taking huge strain and hanging on by her nails and myself, for the fact that I am losing patience with Bob when I do, that I forget his brain is three years old until he has pushed my head so fast and furiously into the wall that my reaction is to get impatient and this morning I got angry, really angry for the first time.
I see Bob’s side of the family distinctly distant from the problem, as though it will rub off. I see him reaching for memories that were eaten by Alz Heimers a while ago and are no longer there. He asks to speak to his brother, Doug, on the phone even though he has no concept of who he is talking to. I am sure in Bob’s head he sees a picture of himself in his early twenties when this happens. I think this because he asks his brother how the folks are, when those particular people have been dead for over 40 years.
This is a very cruel disease. The medical fraternity don’t know enough about it. There is no cure. Sufferers go on for 10 years (average) from the time they’re diagnosed. Caregivers are filled with self-recrimination, guilt for anger and impatience and then guilt for wanting to put them into care, making them hang on to hell far longer than they should.
Alzheimers is fast becoming a disease of pandemic proportions – I wonder whether someone will change the phrase for the retirement age from the “Golden Years” to the “Vanished Years” when this disease becomes more prolific and wider reaching than cancer?
It’s one thing knowing about the disease and another altogether knowing the disease intimately. I am deeply sad for all who go through this, on whatever level.