Rabbit Ears, Spinny Knobs and a Good Thumpin'.

Posted the day before New Year’s Eve, 2019

Hi all! Thank you for granting me the respite few days to celebrate the Christmas season! It was a wonderful few days and mom was well, all things considered, too. 🙂 She had good days and less good days. She is quite happy, but her speech as become noticeably more challenged. This is the topic of this piece. Please start by watching this wonderful video by Teepa Snow:

https://youtu.be/0BlZF_4EKp4

I have a long history with old TVs before the days of cable/satellite and ultimately the cord cut movement we all enjoy now. In fact, television “Rabbit Ears” (antennas) and I go way back! Some of what I can remember:

Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay

(Prune) Grandma using rabbit ears to get her “stories”, a.k.a. soap operas, in the 1970’s and 1980’s when I would spend the night with her at her senior housing facility. They had 4-plexes and I can remember, vividly, at least one other lady next door screaming at her TV like my Grandma did when Nikki would make a dumb move and take back Victor…or not take him back… Grandma Applegate also had a “clicker”, a remote that operated through sounds and its click sound triggered channels to change. (I am not sure why I was allowed to call Grandma “Prune” Grandma. She was a wonderful blessing for all of us. 🙂
I remember my (Green) Grandma using rabbit ears to get The Dukes of Hazzard just after the McLaughlin Group on PBS was over. (She was lucky to be able to be named after the color of her house instead of the texture of a wrinkled dried plum!)
I remember us using rabbit ears in collaboration with our Atari 2600 video game system to toggle between Qix and PBS when we were “sick” during the school year. It had a nifty little lever switch that let us choose between the two.
Later in life…much later…I sold rabbit ears at our Radio Shack franchise stores I and my siblings owned. They had fallen into the realm of the turntable for a while until the digital TV conversion changed TV and necessitated their use again

Just getting a signal in a TV was hard enough in those days. Throw in the works the picture’s many picture settings, its position and the dreaded “horizontal hold” and it took a village to get a decent picture on these heavy piles of tubes and transistors. These fine tuning items were typically adjusted on the back in a set of little spinny knobs. One person would have to sit in the front (unless you were better than I was with a mirror) while the other would relentlessly turn knobs until his/her hands cramped into a heap. If you reached over the screen while you adjusted these settings, the resulting static shock would make you pee a little and hurt a lot.

(Note: the last bits of “adjustments”, if you will:

Thwacking/smacking/thumping/slamming/where-the-heck-is-my-Louisville-Sluggering??? the TV on the top or the side to make the horizontal hold work better or it would at least make YOU feel better in frustration.
Fine-tuning the antenna signal consisted of one of two options: 1. Have a person adjust it during which the signal worked better while he/she was holding the antenna (especially me with my braces and/or headgear). “A little more….a little more…OK…wait….stop!!!!! NOW, DON’T TOUCH ANYTHING!!! WALK AWAY SLOWLY!!! Dang it!!!! You moved it! OK…try again” Multiplied x 6-120 attempts. OR 2. Wrap wads of tin foil at the ends if the rabbit ears. Maybe run a wire coat hanger across the span of the rabbit ears. Heck, sometimes the wire coat hanger worked better than the rabbit ears so you just poke the end of the hanger in the hole or sit it on the threaded antenna input and hope to the Good Lord nobody touched it. This guys knows the struggles!…and…THIS guy knows how to adjust them. 😉
Here is a tutorial, sort of.

What does this have to do with the blog subject? Well, compared to many of my posts, it should be obvious. Mom is having a terrible time right now in fine adjustments. In late stage dementia, your fine motor skills are largely gone. Mom cannot hold up a cup, more days than not. She cannot pick up small items nor can she speak clearly. The big movements are starting to go too, but these smaller things, when added up, sure seem like a huge thing. Her words, if you will, have lost their horizontal hold. She starts speaking, often in the right cadence, but then veers off the rails to a scrolling, stutter. For example, the word breakfast would be pronounced “Bu+Buh+Bre+br+bre+brek+brek+breafas” in a long string of sounds. It really frustrates mom and it makes me sad for her and for all who suffer. We shoot to complete her word to take the pressure off and to show empathy, but we want to be sure we have it right because her dignity deserves as much. It is very hard and Teepa Snow in the above video does an outstanding job explaining it. Sadly, for my mom, she would love it if she could just thwack herself on the side of the head to fix the problem. 🙁

This is a hard disease. Devastating. To see someone as articulate as mom be rendered unable to function day-in and day-out and progressively worsen is a new kind of terrible for my pretty darn sheltered life. However, it makes me want to fight harder to #EndALZ and to serve folks struggling in this mess. Some sweet day, however, believers will all be in heaven, and their old RCAs that has to be thwacked will be replaced with a thump-free 1000″ Ultra HD with a perfect picture… and with no spinny knobs required…for eternity. The day can’t come fast enough!

Update: Mom had another good Christmas weekend. I was fortunate to spend a few days with her and at different times than my norm. This is always a good plan for a monitoring standpoint although the uniformity/routine of coming at the same time is better for the patient. She is happy and generally doing OK. She has LOVED her Christmas cards. Again, thank you very, very much all of you who have sent them!!! 🙂 Off we head toward 2020! Let’s keep fighting this mess. Lots of folks are hurting…