For those of you who don’t know, I live with my eighty year old grandmother and am one of her primary caretakers.
Memory loss in the elderly is frustrating for everyone. The person who is starting to lose their memory (in this case, my grandmother) may go through a period of denial. They know that something isn’t right; they know they’re forgetting things or feel like they’re going crazy. My grandmother tries to cover for her forgetting in two ways: either she swears up and down that you never told her what you told her or she makes something up to fill in the gap.
The making something up can be funny sometimes. She has accused our former cleaning person of taking her pastry brush. She has accused my boyfriend of stealing paper plates. The health aide who comes twice a week apparently sneaks angel food cakes into her shopping cart at the food store. Some of her stories are more than a little outrageous.
What is most frustrating for me is the repetition. She’ll ask me several times every morning what day it is. Every time we’ve gone outside into the yard this week, we have the same conversation about a tree that may be dying. Little things like the day or recent conversation don’t seem to stick in her short-term memory. I’m not always as patient as I should be.
On my birthday this past March, she got very upset because she thought it was July and she didn’t have a present for my brother’s birthday.
One day last week, we spent three hours searching for her checkbook, which she swore my mother had. When I found it stuffed into a drawer between two novels, she burst into tears. She truly believed that my mother had the checkbook, and she had no recollection of hiding it in the drawer.
The doctor had offered to put her on Aricept, a drug that is said to halt or slow memory loss. However, she refused to have the tests he asked for before he would write the prescription. So instead we have the denial, the crazy stories, the forgetfulness, and all the fun that entails.
If you are concerned about a loved one’s memory problems, take the Early Detection For Alzheimer’s Quiz.