Posted 10/29/18
Mom was a mess today. I colored with her in her new Noah’s Ark coloring book to begin to settle her down.
The human brain is an extraordinary bundle of meat. Think of memories like little pathways from point A to B. Broken pathways=memory loss. The brain desperately seeks rest. Healthy or unhealthy, the brain “likes” to be on autopilot when it can so it can be “ready” for whatever new things happen. It also likes connecting existing pathways into new patterns (learning from your pool of building blocks, not unlike how math builds on itself). The brain isn’t thrilled with chiseling new pathways from nothing and it takes a lot of effort and leaves you vulnerable/distracted from other important things (perhaps dangers?). In a brain-bandit case like my mom with mid-late Alzheimer’s, she is extremely hindered in creating new pathways and her existing paths are breaking down. Therefore her anxiety increases. She hoards her possessions into a pillow case for fear she won’t remember where they are. You can see her processing every thought like a toddler, almost evaluating her pathways to see if she can get to point B from there. She seeks familiarity or similarity where she can. But with failing tools.
Tonight she changed shoes at least 15 times…back and forth. The cause? I am 99% sure it was because, as I discovered, she has a corn on her foot and it hurt, but there wasn’t a good pathway helping her process the cause of the pain…but she has a pathway that at some point her shoe probably hurt her feet.
Not all was bad: We did have some fun joking around, throwing a beach ball and took a brief trip outside into the courtyard. She couldn’t process outdoor-ness, and needed to return inside where familiarity breeds comfort. I met another patient that has always been asleep when I have been there…and she smiled and thanked me for coming to see her… 4 times in 10 minutes. 🙂
For another perhaps easier illustration of the challenges of this disease, if you are younger…think of a very awkward social event where we have to communicate with strangers. In the 1990s and earlier we just stumbled around and awkwardly conversed as best we could. Today, we just hide behind our angst-protector…our smartphones. Our brain loves the phone brain stimulation and the lessened angst of communicating and we exhale and wait for it to pass. (Probably very bad for us socially…but I digress) An Alzheimer’s phone is broken and they have to anxiously think…and have broken mechanisms to do so….and are wearing unmatching socks and inside out sweatpants
Alzheimer’s stinks. 🙁
#EndALZ