Birth of My Blog

Many years ago, my grandfather nicknamed he and grandmom's lake front property in Arkansas, "Senility Acres," when he was in his eighties. He used to write letters to the members of his Pioneers club that always began, "Greetings from Senility Acres."

Well, I think the salutation fits my current circumstances quite well; therefore, I will carry on the tradition. Fortunately for him, he really was just joking about their life and thier age....unfortunately for me, I have been thrust into the world of dementia headfirst. I am now the caretaker for my mother, Mary Beth.

I'm going to write my story in this blog and journal about my feelings and use it as an outlet to try and get to a healthier place in my life, to feel like others out there in this world are listening, and I'm going to try and ween myself off of Effexor XR at the same time without totally losing it. After a long, gutwrenching cry in the bathtub tonight, I decided to log onto the Internet and look up others going through what I'm going through. I happened upon Dementia Blues and it inspired me to try this blog thing out. It's my first time doing so.

I guess I'll begin with an overview of what has happened, then flesh out the story in subsequent posts. It all started when my father, a manic depressive, committed suicide in 1990. I was 19 years old and working at Kroger's floral department when I received the call that there was an emergency and I was to come home right away. He and my mother had been in a fight and she had left to go to the park and needlepoint. He ran to their bedroom and shot himself. I have thought about it many times, and I think he must have just felt like he had to escape the ever present pain in his life and that was the ONLY way out. You have to remember, they didn't have Prozac, Paxil, or any other of the popular antidepressants back then. You could take something (I think it started with an L) but you would feel totally out of it if you did.

Fast forwarding to a year and half later, Mom met good ole Walter. Ugh. He was an uneducated hillbilly who drank and apparently did more drugs than I ever even realized. My mom fell in love with him because "he could really dance." In fact, that is why the people that worked with both of them introduced the two. I was relieved at first because Mom had been pining away for a different loser named Gary who managed a Good Year Tire and liked to take her out to look at the stars with his telescope. He also made passes as his nephews young wife under the Thanksgiving table....I know this because I worked with the wife. I tried to tell her what a loser he was, but she wouldn't listen. He looked just like a man on a local ad that threatened to eat a rat if he coudlnt' give you the best deal in town on a waterbed. In fact, my brother stood up in his highschool class one day and exclaimed, "That man is dating my mother!" when he saw the ad on t.v. Nope, she was dating his look alike however.

She married Walter about a year after they met and it was all downhill from there. Not only did he collect Indian plates, spend way too much money ordering things off t.v, smoke in the house, drink moonshine, lose a new job every few months, litter our yard with old refrigerators and other broken appliances...but he talked mom into mortgaging her almost-paid-for-house to buy an 18 Wheeler he named "The Peddlar." Well, his career as a trucker didn't last long. He was soon saddled with his fifth DUI and his license was revoked for 5 years.

Mom lost her job as a AutoCad draftsperson and sunk into what I call a depression. She would not get much help and claimed she wasn't depressed. Walter, the man who couldn't hold and job, was now the primary bread winner. Mom as it turned out, was experiencing the very beginning stages of Frontal Temporal Dementia (FTD)-a.k.a. Pick's Disease. Last year, I insisted on getting her to a doctor to find out once and for all what was wrong with her (two years back we did the same thing and she was labeled with "psuedo dementia" --we all just thought that meant she was stressed out). Now, I was noticing a marked difference in her personality. She was withdrawn and was having a great deal of trouble speaking.

She was diagnosed with FTD early in 2006. Walter didn't go to one dr appt with us. He finally began to admit something was wrong with her and did try to help her to practice math problems at night. He also reminded her to take her medicine. It was ironic that this woman, who could have been in MENSA most likely at one point in her life, was now being shown up by Walter, a man with no more than an eighth grade education.

I'll get more into the details in later posts, but this past November Walter, Mom's second husband, committed suicide also. He shot himself in the woodpile in their backyard at around 10:50 pm Nov 2, 2006. It was awful. He didn't think about those of us that would have to clean him up afterwards. The coroner removed the body, but we had to pick up the fragments. The cat even got a piece of his sideburn to the utter horror of my husband who saw it. My brother, husband, and another family member ended up washing him down the drain....what a loser. He promised my poor Mom that he would be there with her forever and never leave. She, instead, got the pleasure of finding him dead in the backyard after hearing the shotgun go off. I'm sure memories of finding her first husband flooded back to her.

She managed to call his family who came over and called me. I drove an hour from home and arrived there about 1:30 am. My mother and I stayed all alone that night by ourselves. I gave her a sleeping aid and just laid on the couch with her until she drifted off.

Fast forward three weeks. My saint of a husband allowed me to take my Mom in and she is now living with us. She is doing quite well. Pick's Disease is odd. You have trouble communicating and sometimes appear pretty demented, but at other times seem normal. Meanwhile, in the early stages of the disease many people are able to still do things like hook up a computer, create art work, etc. Mom mother has turned our basement into a glass stepping stone workshop and she is working with stained glass again. She began learning this craft about 7 or so years ago, but it almost completely went to the wayside during this past year. She just now picked it back up and is doing marvelous. On Christmas day she taught me how to translate a pattern into glass...I haven't completed my stone yet...but it is on it's way.

Things are good and I treasure this time with Mom; however, I am also swimming against a current of paperwork and other stress that goes along with being a caregiver. I am doing this with little help from my brother. Tonight I got angry about that and I was feeling overwhelmed. I also was sad all of a sudden as my mom struggled to communicate with me as she helped me cook. She's doing great, actually speaking more fluently lately, but it just saddens me that she ins't the same Mom I grew up with . She wasn't supposed to leave me this fast, dammit! I am tearing up now...so I'll stop writing about here. I need to go to bed anyway. I am mad at my husband because I don't feel like he's helping out enough, but I'm not sure if I'm overreacting. He is dealing with alot too. I know he never thought he was marrying my mother, just me. We've only been married for 2 years and now he has me, our 2 Great Danes, my Mom, and her two little dogs (which he hates). To top it all off, neither dog is fixed (Cookie the male keeps running off and Lucy the female is having the longest period on history. Mom bought her some doggy maxi pads -ugh. My husband alomst passed out. That is another story for another post though.

Good night all!