Update on Mother

On Tuesday Mother had surgery to remove several skin cancers from her face. She came through the surgery (it took about 2 hours, required general anesthesia, and included some skin grafting) just fine. While she was in the recovery room she thought she was playing bridge, kept asking me whether all the trumps were gone, and told me "My mind is a blank, you will have to help me." But that confusion faded pretty quickly.

I am realizing that, over the last several months while Mother has been at Comfort Care Homes, she has actually been getting better. This is something I had not anticipated. Her cognitive crash, back at the end of June, last year, was so precipitous and persistent that it seemed obvious that she would continue to get worse, fairly quickly. That just isn't happening. She is definitely remembering, registering new information, creating and retrieving new long-term memories. The staff at her house had the date of her facial surgery wrong, and she kept correcting them; turns out, she was right. And when I tell her I am coming to visit her on a certain day, she remembers it quite well. There is no way I can evade or trick her about visits. On the other hand, she is quite convinced that she has been living in her current house for 7 years, and she can't be budged on that one. And when I bring her snacks (candy, or cookies), we agree to keep them in the middle drawer of her dresser. She never remembers that they are there.

Sometimes I am not at all sure that this dementia is actually Alzheimer's. But if not that... I don't know what it is, and nobody else seems to know (or really care), either. We will be going back to the neurologist later this month, and I'll ask him what he thinks. I suppose that it really doesn't matter, in terms of how he will be treating her. She's doing fine on the medications she is now on.

What might make a difference, though, is her living situation. The other patients in the Comfort Care facility where she's now living are in much worse shape, cognitively, than Mother is. I am working on getting her moved to the other house, where there are a couple of patients who actually read the newspaper, watch movies, and talk with each other. Mother has never been good at making friends with neighbors... but just being around people who are still capable of carrying on a conversation has got to be better for her than being around people who cannot. She has been complaining about this situation for as long as she has been there ("I am NOT like these people!"), and she's right. She's really not like them. I would be complaining, too.