Goaled Veins

Posted 3-29-19

Flashback, circa 1980.

Location: Silver Dollar City (amusement park), nestled in the Ozark Mountains of Southwest Missouri.

Setting: A simpler time and place, in the woods with mockingbirds mocking and crows crowing. The smell of cedar, pork rinds, somewhat damp visitors and joy permeates the air. Just up from the Rube Dugan’s Diving Bell at Lake Silver (One of my very favorite SDC experiences from the early 80s!!!Loved it!!!), there was an artificial mini-creek that cascaded down the hill and emptied into said lake. This was my inexplicable happy place at the park. All of the amazing rides at Silver Dollar City, meant for kids like me and my friend Stuart, and I wanted to hang out by what was really a small trickle.

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Purpose: “Boat” races.

My friend Stuart and I spent many a day at Silver Dollar City growing up. I will ALWAYS love this park! It was a better, simpler time back then. In a move that would absolutely command a call to either family services or a mental health facility in 2019, our parents would slip us (pre-teens) a 20 spot and turn us loose in the park. I am sure they stayed around, possibly watching glass-blower demonstrations, eating taffy or hooting/hollering at the showgirls at the saloon show, but we usually wouldn’t see them again until we gathered at the Old Mine Restaurant or maybe the Lumberjack area for lunch.

Sure we hit a couple favorites: Rube Dugan’s Diving Bell (!!), The Flooded Mine, Fire in the Hole (if we felt bold), and later the American Plunge, but one of our favorite activities was racing “boats” in this non-ride, mini-creek. Note: I would be slandering creeks to call this drool a creek, for it spanned maybe 3 feet across, wandering through a man-made channel of fake rock, but to us it was the Ozark’s creek version of the Indianapolis Speedway… for boats. We were short of formal “boats”, mind you, so we would create a boat out of similar-sized bark chips, pork loins (proved to be disastrous melters), cigarette butts (gag), or jelly tubs with makeshift toothpick sails. We would start at the top of the hill, carefully place our boats next to each other’s, then let them go (often accusing the other of cheating by pushing for a head start).

And we were off!!!

We sprinted through the busy pedestrian traffic, dodging stroller-bearing moms and oblivious dads wearing blue civil war hats covering their baldness , trying all the while to remember which boat was ours. We had to keep track of us and them and to be ready to dislodge a stuck boat from a fallen branch or a discarded funnel cake dam that may await! In the end…at the goal… a winner…then it all began again. Ultimately some lovingly puritanical, 1880’s-dress-wearing employee would shoo us away since we caused issues with all of the running around and screaming in triumph stuff…or perhaps they feared we would leave the trash behind? Who knows? But the joy would eventually be stopped by a person or, occasionally, by failing to catch our boat at the end of the selected track. Just past the end of the race is where the creek disappeared under the concrete walkway and emptied into the greening Lake Silver. Boat doom. 🙁 You had to grab it before it was gone….and finding another one like that trash champion seemed like a Herculean challenge.

Fast forward some 35+ years and out of the woods and fun into my life today.

Great life! Wonderful job, loving wife, great kiddos but, unfortunately, a mom who is slowing dying of Alzheimer’s. Mom has and likely won’t ever receive a truly scientific, medical diagnosis of Alzheimer’s since the disease can only be truly seen that way post-mortem in an autopsy that we will likely not consider. She was diagnosed with “mild dementia symptoms” nearly a decade ago and the disease meandered around slowly at first, weaving through the obstacles of mom’s life. Forgotten car parking spots, names and the like. Then repeated stories in the same conversation gave way to anxiety, hoarding possessions in a purse and the rest…you know the story. Mom’s doctor’s later updated brain scan showed brain mass loss, consistent with Alzheimer’s and related dementias. She didn’t put a specific label on it officially for us, but she is sure that Alzheimer’s and that it would eventually take her life.

Spending a year and a half studying the brain (too much) and later observing the Sweet 17 and a host of other struggling with this disease, it seems most likely mom has “typical Alzheimer’s” but, while less likely(?), she could very well have vascular dementia instead. I have written much about “typical” Alzheimer’s, but vascular dementia has some symptoms that particularly point at it as the main mover for mom’s maddening malady.

According to the Mayo Clinic, the main symptoms of vascular dementia are:

Confusion

Trouble paying attention and concentrating

Reduced ability to organize thoughts or actions

Decline in ability to analyze a situation, develop an effective plan and communicate that plan to others

Difficulty deciding what to do next

Problems with memory

Restlessness and agitation

Unsteady gait

Sudden or frequent urge to urinate or inability to control passing urine

Depression or apathy

This symptom list is somewhat unsatisfying since it overlaps virtually all forms of the ailment. Why I suspect it as a possibility: Mom has never had a stroke, as far as her doctor has noted, but certainly could have had micro-blockages characteristic of this version of the disease. She completely has the “stair-stepped getting worse, then stabilizing” routine common with this brain vein condition and less common with other forms of dementia. In fact, Mom does the stair step routine perfectly. She also smoked for over 50 years before quitting when she got married 20+ years ago. She has struggled off and on with depression as well.

In vascular dementia, usually the super-small blood vessels in the brain have blockages that lead to damage to nearby brain matter. Therefore, the location of the blockages initiate the appropriate symptoms based on the function of that dying location. As long as the micro-creek still flows and no issue stops the activity, all is well. Hinder the flow, harm the matter. Blood and micro-vein’s goal: get where it needs to go to victory. Anything less is infinitely worse than a funnel cake stuck bark boat. 🙁

In the end, it really doesn’t matter at this point which condition mom has. Today, her blood pressure is great, she can (barely) still walk, her nutrition is carefully regulated, and there are no other valid treatments for the disease in whatever form it attacks. I added a bunch of links in bold for you to do your own research on vascular dementia.

I yearn to return to the days of the simple boat race at SDC, and meeting mom and dad for a quick, but slightly overpriced burger (or a berries and cream on a hot day). Then off we go as a family to Rube Dugan’s Diving Bell or another ride. 🙂 Life and circumstances…and brain diseases!…happen, and today we have wonderful, amazing families and step-families that I wouldn’t trade for 1,000 worlds, but oh for the simple mini-creek boat race. But now until heaven, though, we trod on, looking, hoping, praying, advocating, serving, and loving patients as they are…and looking heavenward where the boat never gets stuck and the joy of victory never ends.

#EndALZ

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Picture Link

Note: The Rube Dugan’s Diving Bell was a simulated trip under the Lake Silver (more of a pond, but still awesome) to search for treasure and avoid mines and the bad guys trying to take our treasure or sink us. Projected images simulated the ride under water and their cast wonderfully commandeered members of the crowd to help in many ways during the journey. It was a high-tech for the time, low tech for today, thrill ride of joy. I sure miss rides like that which were replaced by the ever-popular mega-coasters and the like. Similar to the train ride, you could ride it several times and know exactly what was going to happen, but still find a surprise or two in store.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/juniordugan/sets/72157628751691911/with/11333310085/