Surviving Dad

It’s interesting how dealing with someone afflicted with fronto-temporal dementia affects and effects your life. I guess I should start with a quick update. My dad’s dementia increases at a rate easily observable by those of us who are with him every day. Within the past couple of weeks, I’ve stopped letting him tag along with me when I do errands around town. He’s gotten too skittish and is too prone to wandering (and is too slow) for me to handle when I’m out in public. It was like a switch went off in his head, and boom, he stopped being a shopping companion.

My mom has the worst bit as she’s in charge of bathing him, as he can’t really handle it by himself anymore. It would be comic if the firsthand experience wasn’t so tragic and frustrating. Asking him to wash a leg or an arm is likely to have him instead reaching out to wash the shower wall.

I think the most surprising thing is how tired both my mom and I are all the time. In the spring and early summer, for me, this was caused a lot by all the work around the house I was doing that had been neglected by my dad for a while. Now, the mutual fatigue is largely due to our respective depressions. We’ve been having symptoms of depression since about the start of the year, but now it’s becoming obvious that it’s settling in. We are each getting increasingly apathetic about things like sleep and eating. More annoying is that we are both tired all the time, and exertion of any kind easily wipes us out very quickly.

Thank goodness for the WNBA this summer. It’s been my solace in the face of this energy-sapping life-event. My mom relies on talking with some of her various siblings for a few hours everyday. I don’t have anything like that support system set up: a person or group of people not living in this milieu who can distract or otherwise lift some of the emotional burden. I do have friends and a hard-to-describe extended family, but few of them are as full of the gift of gab as I am. C’est la vie.

Right now, it seems that we are in the middle of this particular medical marathon. It can certainly get worse, so we’re just trying to keep our spirits as up as we can for the time being. It would be great if we could place my dad in some facility that caters to this condition, but we are neither rich enough or destitute enough (nor do we want to be destitute enough) for the non-universal health care country (but that complaint is for another blog). So, it’s up to us. If prayer (or its equivalent) is something you do, please pray that my father sloughs off this mortal coil as quickly as possible — for the sake of his quality of life…and for ours.