Dementia–whether it’s Alzheimer’s, vascular dementia, or both–is a terrible disease: it takes away a person’s mind.
I know this all too well because my mother was diagnosed with dementia about two years ago. Since then, it has been nothing but stress on me, my three siblings, and our families.
My mother has a history of high blood pressure, and has had some mini-strokes–also known as transient ischemic attacks, or TIAs–when she was in her 40’s. Although her doctors think that is the main reason why she developed dementia (of the vascular type), they also did not want to rule out Alzheimer’s.
I started noticing a change in my mother about ten years ago while I was in college: it seemed as though she became more paranoid and forgetful then usual; however, I just attributed it to aging. She was put on a medication for her memory called Aricept–which she refused to take–a couple of years ago; however, things took a turn for the worst around Christmas of 2009 when she started to wander.
The morning after Christmas, she decided to walk and hitchhike to a pharmacy from her house. She got in the car with “a nice married couple,” which is totally unlike her: growing up, she taught me to “trust no one,” but the fact that she thought she was safe getting into a car with some people she didn’t know just because they were married was a huge red flag.
Shortly afterward, she started talking strangely about one of her favorite priests in our Catholic church: she told virtually everyone–including a woman whom she was sponsoring for initiation into the church–about how he was having an affair with one of the parishioners who had died, insinuating that the woman had faked her death so that the “affair” would not come to light. She also talked about how the priest allegedly threatened her in front of a group of parishioners because she found out that she knew about the alleged affair. These strange stories, and the fact that she would repeatedly ask the same answered question only about several minutes apart, was a signal that the dementia had taken a toll for the worst.
Things just went downhill from there: she tried to flee to Brooklyn, New York to see my godmother without us knowing. Then, she started to accuse my eldest sister and her husband of stealing her money and trying to kill her. When she finally realized her memory was going, she blamed it on my brother and said that, under the direction of my sister, he came into her home and put something on her head to make it that way.
Her wandering got to the point where she could not be left alone. We hired adult sitters to come to her home; however, she ran most of them off by being mean and violent toward them. We then had no other choice but to put her in a locked unit of an assisted living home, which was devastating to everyone.
It is sort of ironic, really: my mother, a former Certified Nurse’s Aid (CNA), used to take care of people in her with dementia; now, she has people taking care of her. It is also not like my mother to be locked down and under supervision: she used to be a very independent woman who would travel the world at the drop of a dime. Every year, my mother would travel anywhere from The Holy Land to her native Trinidad, or go on some sort of cruise or pilgrimage. Now, she is not able to even leave the facility without supervision.
Seeing my mother in her current state has been a tough pill to swallow for everyone who knew her. It is like they had already lost their friend or sister, and we have lost our mother, even though she is still alive and with us physically. It is sad because she will only be 70 in June. With dementia, there is not turning back or reversing it–our mother will never be the same person again.