Posted 4-4-19
Hi all! Thanks for returning to the digital cornbread table. 🙂 Today’s topic du jour is, go figure, Alzheimer’s and brain meds. Never to be one to overly mind beating metaphorically dead horses, we need to revisit this discussion since you will certainly battle this should you journey with your loved one toward the setting sun of dementia.
While the cornbread anthem is the title song of this blog, what I love more dearly even yet is a good cheeseburger. I lived much of my adult life in a little lake community in southwest Missouri. This hamlet may have been known more as the “black walnut capital of the world” (Hammon’s Walnuts is the central business in town), and I do love me a tasty walnut, what I most dearly love about Stockton is a little burger joint near the lake called Squeeze Inn. Transplants from California, the Noblett family, owners of this burger joy factory, make the best cheeseburgers I have ever consumed. This fact is incredibly impressive since I have inhaled much more than my share of burgers in my day. What makes this delightful, gnome-filled burger mecca remind me of our topic isn’t the cheese halos on the burgers nor is it the hand-cut fries, the sun tea, the kid’s meals that will bring a sparkle to the eye of any child. Those things are all great, but what brings our topics to an intersection is what dons the walls of the little taste of heaven. Gracing the structure throughout are hundreds and hundreds of gnomes as well as the “Said to Be” museum. I will not offer spoilers here, but items such as alleged movie props and historical items are spread throughout the little place, all with a plaque below each that says “(Item) is ‘said to be’ the ….of the (movie/event)….” Are do they REALLY have the actual gems they claim to have in the exhibit? Who knows, but it is awesome to dream that they are and I find myself giving them the benefit of the doubt and applauding their historical preservation skills…and their burgers. (Drooling sounds)
Similarly, but with different consequences, brain meds whether for behavioral mental health conditions or memory issues, have a “whole lotta splainin’ to do”. When you watch a TV commercial or look through literature on nearly all of these meds, they say “Medicine X is believed to work by….(explanation)”. Is it “said to work by” X or DOES it work by X? Very different questions. I am not saying they do not work. I am not anti-medicine. I am not anti-Big Pharma…not even a little. Medicines save lives by the second. However, this odd methodology of explaining the functions of the brain medicine category means either they are hiding the truth or they don’t know why it works, neither of which is particularly settling to the heart. Say something enough times and it has to be true, right?
At our request, after several days of asking, mom’s meds were backed off two days ago, in the evening right at bedtime. Yesterday, in my visit, mom was already noticeably more active, stronger, and even happier. Meds tend to accumulate and don’t go away when the symptom is “fixed”, a relative term in dementiaville. In the doctor’s defense, he has nearly 200 patients that he shares with one other doctor in addition to what caseload they have elsewhere. It is hard to keep track of things like laxatives for a “resolved” constipation, or muscle relaxers for a pulled muscle from a fall that happened a long time ago. Note: I am in no way trashing this medical soldier.
Three other thoughts:
- We requested that her meds be reexamined mainly because she has been exhausted for a month now. No piano. No walking or even eating without assistance. Lots of sleep! Sure the anxiety is better, but the quality of life isn’t better if you stare at a wall for 4 hours in the same seat between our visits. Is it a result the progression of the illness? She is stage 6 out of 7…not exactly a happy pace to be in the memory ailment world to be sure. It could certainly be just the damage spreading. The medicine change: two equally-likely culprits for mom’s lethargy were removed. This frustrates me as a computer troubleshooter by trade. Are both problems to blame or just one? Start easy and work toward hard. What if removing one helps and removing the other hurts or was needed elsewhere? Sigh. Wouldn’t one at a time be more of a troubleshooting solution finder?
- It is my and your job to advocate for these folks. The doctors and nurses are awesome, but they are overworked and prone to choosing simplicity—yanking a couple meds—rather than complexity. Maybe the call was perfect? So far today, reports are that she is still better. Last night I noticed that she was starting to struggle with the month’s- gone obsessing over people’s appearance, objects on the ground and other things and the anxiety may well follow. Reducing a psychotropic drug surely is to blame, but maybe the muscle relaxer played in too. It is a balancing act, and we will be adding and subtracting little bags of sand to the scale for a month as we figure out how this med change will work.
- Getting patients to take meds can sometimes be very hard, so minimizing them helps in that area too. Mom had a big, fat med issues yesterday (again) like she did a few months ago. We shall see in that realm too. We will re-emphasize the need to ground up her meds and put them in yogurt….but then we cannot see whether she got what she needed at all. It all looks the same ground up. 🙁
I look forward to visiting with the doctor this afternoon to discuss the topics I mention here. We have a good team albeit a tired one. I can only squeeze so much time out of them before they move on, but it is part of the gig. And if even part-time garegiving was “said to be” simple, the idiot who said that “has some splainin’ to do”.
#EndALZ