The humor in the daily routine

Day 6 with Grammy:

Before I came here my mom tried to warn me that spending time with my Grandmother would at times be like spending time with a toddler. It came up mainly in reference to the importance of going for walks, or running errands outside, during the day in order to make sure she gets some fresh air (she gets anxious being inside all day, but she won't ask to go out ever). My mom said that it may be like dealing with a toddler, where it takes you 20 minutes to get dressed to go outside for 10 minutes. This is kind of true, but I'd say that Grammy is a little quicker than that right now. But there are some ways that Grammy's memory loss results in behavior that is comparable to what we might consider typical of a child.

Case in point: My Aunt Elsa ordered Grammy a new pair of shoes from LLBean and had it shipped to my Aunt Sue's house (next door). Grammy has these old brown shoes that are really comfortable, but they are falling apart. She told me about 20 times in the first two days that people tell her that her shoes are dumpy, but that she likes them and doesn't care because she doesn't go out ever. Every once in a while she would tell me that sometime she will need to go shoe shopping because her shoes are falling apart. Clearly the shoes were on her mind, but she'd change her view on the subject depending on her mood. You must realize, my Grandmother is the type of person who DOES care about those things. She would normally never wear something that looked "dumpy", so her recent acceptance of such things is a sign of her resignation that her life has changed and she can't keep up with the pace of life she once had. Anyway, the shoes arrived yesterday and Sue walked the box over to the house. I opened them for Grammy, she tried them on, they were overall ok (although not as wide as a 7 1/2 W should be). I left the box out because it was unclear whether they would really fit well, and I wanted to be able to pack them up if we needed to return them. Then today, Grammy spent the whole day playing with the box, like a child. She would pick it up as soon as she noticed it again and open and close it and look at the label. She'd notice that the label was for Annette Susan Hernandez (my Aunt Sue next door) and not her name, Annette R. Hernandez. I'd tell her that Elsa ordered it and had it sent to Sue's house. Then she's say "oooh, Ok." and we did that several times. I'd leave the room and walk back in to it and she'd have the box back in her lap, fiddling with it. It really just makes me smile, because she was just sooooo intrigued by that box! It made her day, and kept her busy. I think I can get rid of it now because she seems to like the shoes.

There are a couple of other instances of memory loss that crack me up, and I hope you all can share a bit in the humor of it. One was last night when Sue's cat Velcro came in and sat next to Grammy to let her pet him. Velcro is a 15 year old cat and has a skin disease that is like psoriasis. He has thick, flaky skin under his fur that is pretty gross because it scratches off. Anyway, Grammy was petting him and all of a sudden touched a part of his skin that was that gross flaky stuff and started brushing aside his fur to see "What is under there??" I told her that he has a skin disease, and she would say "Oh yeah...that's right." Then 5 minutes later she'd start petting him and get a grossed out look on her face and start digging through his hair to see what it was again. This happened maybe five times, and I'm sure you had to be there for it to be really funny, but it was cracking me up. She didn't really mind his skin disease, and when I told her matter of factly that he has a skin disease every time she said "oh that's right. I knew that," but it was like watching a repeat reel of a comedy sketch.

Even funnier is that, I swear, 3 times since I've been here she has told me that she's craving nutella. The first time I found her in the kitchen and I asked her what she wanted. She said she was just craving some nutella, and that she hadn't had any in a while but that she loooves it. So I got her half an English muffin with nutella all made up and she ate it happily. Then a couple days later I found her taking a scoop of nutella with a spoon as a snack in the kitchen and she told me how she just loves the stuff, but hadn't had it for weeks. Then today, after eating a bowl of the pork and poblano stew that I made in the crockpot today (delish!), I found her making a piece of bread with nutella and she told me how nutella is just so delicious and she hadn't had it in a month! I just smiled and agreed that nutella is the bomb. It won't hurt her to eat nutella 3 times a week! And maybe it tastes even better when she thinks she's been craving it for a month!

I bring up these moments because it is so important to find the humor in the face of Alzheimer's. It may seem crude at times, but it is really the only way to get through the changes happening. I feel best when there are times that Grammy is complaining or uncomfortable about something and I figure out a way to respond that makes both of us smile, or laugh it off. It's not just about finding the humor in it from the caretaker's perspective, it's just as important to help the person suffering from the memory loss to find some humor in it.

Another positive note to end on is that I found a slew of really old photos in Grammy's drawer in her bedroom. There were several photos from her wedding, a date with Grampy before they were married, and Elena when she was first born in Panama. We put together several pages for a photo album and it was a great exercise. Grammy could recognize the people and as we sat there, organizing them and putting it all together, she could remember more and more of the stories associated with the events that the photos represented. She'd say that it was good to see the photos, because if she can't remember immediately the stories, the more she sat and thought about it, the more she could remember. She told how when she met Grampy, she was in nursing school in NY and he was studying to be a male nurse. Her friends were all women who were

'deathly shy of men," and she was very shy and turned down many date proposals from other guys. She was introduced to Grampy through a mutual friend, but by accident. Then he invited her to go swimming with him and his friends when the other girl he was seeing was too sick to go with them. Then they never looked back. She knew he was a nice guy and she really liked him. He visited her family in Vermont, and eventually they were married in her home town, Barre, Vermont. By eventually I mean in less than a year. When she was 20. Then we looked at the photos of Elena, and she remembered fondly how she was "a little brat that always ran away" as soon as she could walk. :)