Posting here rather than on the Alzheimers/dementia board as there’s more traffic here.
MIL has literally just had a diagnosis of Alzheimers and vascular dementia. She’s 85, has all sorts of health issues, and nobody’s surprised at this diagnosis given how confused (also seeing dead people) she’s been over the past few months. I actually posted on here about it a while ago. In the wake of MIL’s diagnosis I started looking at information about how Alzheimers manifests itself, and as I was doing so, I started to think - actually, this is MY mum, not just MIL. :-(
My mum is 90. Her memory has been getting progressively worse for the last few years, and we’ve been writing it off as ’she’s 90, of course she forgets things’. However, I’ve been with her for the past 10 days while my older sister - who lives with her - has a much needed holiday. It’s really shocked me how very very much she’s declined mentally. I think you sometimes need to spend a lot of time with someone to notice it properly. Last night she was sorting through a pile of old newspapers to decide which ones to throw out - she asked me what the date was 6 times in the space of about 10 minutes. She’s so repetitive, and cycles of repeating questions are getting shorter and shorter. She can’t retain information at all - what we’re having for tea, the breed and name of my dog (she asks me every day, I tell her, then she promptly forgets). She asks me the same questions about my work every day - they’re the same answers I’ve been giving her for 20 years because that’s how long I’ve been doing my job.
Then there are other things that are really odd. She can’t walk without her frame at all and is very wobbly. I walk with her through the sitting room (where she sleeps) to the bathroom which is off the kitchen, and wait outside to walk her back to her room after she’s had a shower. She comes out the bathroom wrapped in a towel that’s just about to fall off. Every day I put her dressing gown out and tell her to put it on, because if her towel falls, not only will it traumatise the dog walker, who pops in every morning to collect the dog, but it’ll also probably result in my mum having another fall trying save her modesty if it comes off. Every day she puts the towel on instead and ignores her dressing gown.
Then there’s the horrible dog behaviour. Like a lot of old people she has a beloved dog who never leaves her side. She CONSTANTLY feeds this dog - poking food into its mouth, letting it slurp the sugary tea from the bottom of her tea cup, letting it lick the dregs of her cereal after breakfast - just constantly feeding it off her plate, her cutlery and her cup. It makes me heave. The dog has absolutely rotten teeth and hideous breath.
I don’t know why I’ve witnessed these behaviours for quite a while and not questioned if this is dementia. The thing is that sometimes she’s quite sharp - she wants to talk about what’s going on in the world, loves James O Brian, hates Reform, thinks Trump is appalling. She loves looking at people when we go out, although she’s making more and more comments to me about people being fat, which drives me bonkers. It’s so mean!
She also wakes up every morning and is so, so depressed. Every morning she tells me she’s just about to die, but by lunchtime she’ll be enjoying a latte and a slice of cake in M&S cafe, while making a nasty comment about some women’s thighs in cycling shorts.
Sorry - long post! Can Alzheimers look like this?