I'm sitting in the car, crying. Logically, I know there is no reason to be crying, but I can't help it.
I had just left my mother's apartment. It was before she was moved into the memory unit. I don't know what we were discussing, but she was angry with me and yelled at me to leave her apartment and never return. My mother was never a "yeller." I knew it was the mental problems and I knew she wouldn't remember the next day (and she didn't), but it still hurt.
There is a commercial that I see nearly every day now. It follows a woman, who supposedly has Alzheimer's, and it talks about how she would get angry and yell, and it always makes me feel sad and back to that day, crying in the car. It talks about a medication that can make her symptoms better and that makes me sad because my mother never had any medication prescribed for her for her mental problems.
She was never diagnosed with Alzheimer's by a doctor. I just assumed she had it and so they added that to her chart at Kaiser, but she was never given a mental health exam ... not even the simple exam that Trump was given by Dr. Johnson Jackson to remember five words and repeat them back. She saw only two doctors. One of them totally ignored me when I tried to tell him of her problems and said that "when we get older, our brains don't work as well." This was a guy who was billed as a gerontologist, supposedly an expert in old people. They discussed his trip to San Rafael and agreed that a certain street in San Rafael was pretty. I had written him a letter telling him of her problems and I was in the room for her exam and he literally turned his back on me and concentrated on talking with my mother about San Rafael, and didn't listen when I tried to tell him that she often didn't know who I was. I didn't take her back to him.
I chose her PCP as the doctor who is my doctor (and Walt's). She's a nice person, but she doesn't go into a lot of things. I have been seeing her for more than 20 years and she never once has mentioned my weight...which is fine by me, but I realize that any other doctor would be hounding me to lose weight. She examined my mother and pronounced her fine and didn't offer any suggestions for what was going on with her brain.
When I got into a discussion group of dementia caregivers, I discovered the extensive tests that can be given and the medications that can be given which don't cure the Alzheimer's, of course, but can slow its progress.
Whenever I see that commercial on TV, I wonder how my mother's life would have been different if someone had offered her some sort of medication to slow the progress of the dementia.
___________________________________________________________________________
No comments:
Post a Comment