Lewy has been fluctuating in his cognitive abilities lately. A good day, where he doesn’t hallucinate too much, and you can have single concept sentence discussions doesn’t happen more than 3-4 times a month now. He might have a good morning, but except for those rare days, a good morning usually means a not so good afternoon and evening.
It’s odd how when he is having a good day mentally, he is generally having a bad day with the Parkinson’s symptoms. And days where he can get up and walk around the pool table twice (a real good day!) his mental abilities seem to worsen. By the second lap around the table he’s forgotten what he was doing and why.
Today Lewy was up walking around a bit, but totally confused. I had to take him by the hand and walk him to the kitchen to eat breakfast, because he couldn’t recall where the kitchen is located. Considering our house has a great room which includes the kitchen, its hard for me to understand why he can’t find it, when I know he can see it there in front of him. But that’s Lewy. Lewy frequently doesn’t connect what he sees with what he understands.
Even eating is becoming a problem. Lewy holds the utensils perfectly fine, but he has forgotten how to get the food on the fork, or what a normal sized bite should be. I made him the pancakes he requested for breakfast. As he started eating, I started cleaning up the kitchen.
I had my back to Lewy for maybe two minutes. When I turned to face him, he had an entire pancake half stabbed by his fork, dripping syrup, raising it up above his head. I’m not sure what he was doing with the pancake, but it wasn’t getting to his mouth. Lewy struggled with his breakfast so long I decided I better help him out. I doubt it will be too long before I have to give up on him feeding himself, but with Lewy it’s hard to predict any sort of timetable. You just notice one day, that this piece is now gone.
Lewy was getting frustrated and tired trying to eat, so I rolled him in his wheelchair over to his recliner. He sat there for better than thirty minutes trying to figure out how to get up. When I went to offer help he didn’t want it. He was going to do this himself.
Finally he let me coach him on standing up, and pivoting a quarter turn to align his butt with the recliner. A good ten minute process. Once Lewy made it into his chair, I covered him up with his blanket.
Daddy looked straight into my eyes, and asked “Is this everything?”
“What do you mean?”
“Am I ever going to get rid of this thing?” I knew what he meant. What do you say? How do you look at your Dad and tell him he is never going to get better? That it will get worse? That there’s nothing that can be done?
He was looking straight at me. Something that I’m realizing in my old age, that my family didn’t do much, so I knew that this was serious. He was having a rare moment where he was thinking fairly clearly, so I decided to tell him the truth.
“No Daddy, you are not going to get better. You will have some days better than others, but it will be a steady decline.” I could see in his face that he knew what I was telling him. He has always talked about beating Lewy and getting back to his girlfriends. I could see the fear of death in his eyes.
“I’m sorry Daddy.”
“Well, we need to go see about the store. Those people are there waiting on us.”
And just like that Lewy had taken over Daddy’s head. Perhaps the realization of his own demise was too much for him, or perhaps it was nothing more than Lewy’s regularly scheduled arrival. I just hope Lewy will help him to forget.
1 comments:
oldfriend said...
a powerful moment, well written.