Seven unfinished drafts of posts are cluttering up my WordPress file. Two months have passed since I’ve posted anything here, but I keep trying to write, then backspacing to erase whatever I’ve put down.  I’ll just go for it today.

I haven’t known quite what to say recently because Stan and I don’t know what’s going to happen from one day, sometimes one minute,  to the next.  More often than not, I don’t want to write anything at all. I’m a problem-solver by nature and I don’t like to recite a problem without offering a solution.  This one doesn’t have a good solution at all.

I’ve written many times about my mother-in-law’s tall tales she’s told us over the last year and a half. We noticed increasing memory loss long before she and Frank moved to Albany, and we really started to pay attention to her stories after Frank died.  Since early March, though, she’s done more than tell stories and forget to be ready for appointments. Forgetting to change her clothes or go to meals on time is more than memory loss. Her out-of-left-field allegations of petty thefts, threatened violence, verbal abuse, or rampant sickness are more than story-telling; the official word for it is confabulation, and after months upon months of checking out her stories and presenting her with the truth, which she won’t accept, we’re learning to agree with her. It hasn’t been easy at all; trained as journalists, we have a hard time accepting or repeating a whopper, but she calms down when we do.  We had to learn it from the staff who have this stuff down pat and they’re told us the term for it, too — therapeutic fibbing.

And the term for what my mother-in-law has  is Alzheimer’s disease. It’s not an official diagnosis; we turned down the offer of a visit to a neurologist and/or an MRI. Dementia comes in dozens of shapes and sizes but what we’ve learned on our own these last two months, online and at the doctor’s office,  would hold up in court as a preponderance of evidence. She has more symptoms of Alzheimer’s than not. 

Like other diseases, Alzheimer’s progresses through stages. Our research indicates she may be in Stage 4 or 5. And it is a disease — it’s not forgetfulness or absent-mindedness or multitasking confusion. It destroys the brain and the rest of the body gets kidnapped and tortured along the way. Here’s another word for it — terrible.

She’s on medication that’s supposed to help and we think it has, stomach upset notwithstanding — stories involving violence or threats of it have mostly stopped, along with episodes of Sundown Syndrome. But other symptoms and behaviors come and go, and we wait to see what’s next.