Overall, these treatments seem to be making a difference - not necessarily improving her short term memory or her ability to retain new information, but definitely having markedly slowed (possibly stopped) the slide that she was on prior to starting this course.
We got her back to W's house after the transfusion, and she was doing pretty good - a little sleepy from the valium still, but mostly well balanced and emotionally stable. Now she's become combative and frustrated, indignant and childish. A few moments ago she hollered at W that she wants to move out, and told me that "[she] should go to an old folks home."
That isn't happening. Not only would she hate it, but W would hate it, and I would hate it, and the entire situation would be taxing in a completely different way - a way that would eat all of us from the inside out. I read somewhere that life isn't always about making the right choices - its about making a choice and then being able to live with the consequences. I know that this is one of those times.
I don't know how W does it - he does this all the time, and this is his mom. I at least have some distance from it, though I do care deeply about them both.
I just know, as well as he does, that he could never, ever live with putting her somewhere else.
W is my best friend, my better half (a saying I never thought I'd be able to mean when I used, until he came into my life); he brings out a side of me that I never knew I had. When I'm not with him, its as if a half of me is missing. I am sure that I have said this before, and I will probably say it again (over, and over, and over).
When two people agree to get married, they are, also, making the agreement to be the one that outlives the other.
I have no idea what that would look like.
In more ways than I really like to admit, the man makes me the woman I am.
Lets talk a little bit more about W's mom though, the one undergoing treatment. She will, from here on out, be known as B. B is 86 years old - she was born in 1924 - and she misses her first husband incredibly. He's been gone nearly forty years, and she still talks about him all the time - I don't know how much of an active of a missing this is, except around the holidays, and particularly around Christmas - and I know that she misses him incredibly then, and talks of him with great fondness often. B grew up on the east coast, and she was an incredible marksman in her youth. She loves golf (a sport I have yet to fully appreciate), and order - a clean house, good meals, gardening and plants. She's not as good at these things as she was in her youth, and they are the stories W tells me continuously.
That man loves his mother so much. He deserves so much credit that he'll never get; the things he does for her are things that I'm sure others across the nation do for their parents every day, and they all deserve so much more support and compassion and respect than anyone will ever know. It is amazing, and heartbreaking, to see such love.
She (B) has her good days and her bad days, like all of us, and I can only imagine what it's like for her to be entirely across the country from the area she was born and raised. I can only imagine what it must be like to be old in a society where technology advances so quickly that even those who create it can barely begin to keep up. I can only imagine what it's like to have a disease that destroys your brain - kills off the nerve cells necessary for cognition and disintegrates your relationship with the world around you.
I know what it's like at the other end.
Tonight we've tried to keep her seated, so that she wont fall from the disorientation caused by the medication she's been given; her response was to yell at W that, "You sit! You're fat! You're nice and fat, you do the sitting!" He went outside to take a breather, she insisted on going to the bathroom, so I watched down the hall to make sure she'd stay steady and on her feet as she went along. When she came back, she proceeded to tell me how horrible he is, and how if he kept up this sort of behavior she'd leave. She went to the kitchen, did some dishes (under my distant but watchful eye), and began to run the dishwasher. Something as simple as my reminder that we don't run the dishwasher until after eight began another tirade, this time directed toward me. W stepped in then, they argued for a moment, and she left, off to her room as we watched her, guarding her balance from afar.
We remember that the person that's combative isn't B. We remember that the hurtful words and the anger and the anxiety and the yelling and the screaming... that's the disease. That's what Alzheimers leaves in its wake; Dis Ease.
The blessing is that in the morning, she will have forgotten. It may not even take that long. She wont remember that she's angry, and we'll get a fresh start - a fresh B, a slate that hasn't tipped sideways yet, and off into oblivion.
She's back now, and she's feeding the bird.
