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| Joe and I at Grandson Bryan's Willamette University Football Game in 2013 |
Back to 2012,
and a Trip to the Hearing Specialist:
“Hearing
Aids?”
“So you think Joe has hearing loss, and we
should buy hearing aids. Okay, how much are they, I mean for the really good
ones? Holy Cow! That much?”
So we bought
hearing aids, tiny little devices with batteries that were no bigger than that
suspicious-looking age spot on the back of my hand. Well, it turns out that with “Al” helping
Joe, neither of them could get the things working and in Joe’s ears. I’d
walk by the bathroom door, and Joe would be on all fours searching for an itsy-bitsy
battery dropped on the floor. Over time
it became contentious, with me insisting he wear them and him refusing.
That was
back when we still didn’t understand it really wasn’t just hearing loss, but
something far more serious, and another part of our Al problem. I don’t remember when I stopped nagging Joe
about the hearing aids, but I stopped and now the little buggers just stay in
the box.
It has since
become routine to repeat virtually everything.
I can picture it in my head:
Joe hears me
speaking…Al starts doing the “la, la, la” thing in Joe’s ear, which totally
frustrates Joe. Joe then replies in an annoyed tone, “WHAT”.
I get irritated at his tone, purse my lips and
then start repeating myself. This is
particularly fun in a restaurant or a crowded room. Sometimes I feel like we are doing a bad
imitation of Abbott and Costello.
Yes, I am
making light of this. What else can we
do? We can’t change what is happening.
I
said, “We can’t change what is happening”.
I’m getting
really good at guessing games and interpreting the clicks and whistles Joe uses
to finish sentences. It’s like Al is
hacking into Joe’s brain, systematically deleting certain words and messing up
files. And it isn’t just files in Joe’s brain.
Last week, a folder was removed from our office file cabinet in the
garage. We have no idea what happened to it, but it is
completely missing. Mysterious.
This week, I
got a call from a longtime friend that we hadn’t talked to in a couple of years. He had read my blog, which was the first he
had heard of our Al problem. (Of course
he had seen earlier symptoms.) We talked for quite a while just catching
up. Finally he asked if Joe knew that I
was writing the blog, and if so was he okay with it.
That’s a good
question.
The
answer: Yes, I think Joe is somewhat
relieved to have people really “get” what is happening. It must be hard to feel that something is
going sideways with your mind and try to conceal it from people you know, and even
people that you don’t know. We’ve been
in a restaurant ordering dinner and had a server simply ask, “What would you like
to drink?”, and I’ve seen the desperate look on Joe’s face realizing that he absolutely
cannot come up with words like “non-alcoholic beer.” It’s still humiliating for
him when it happens, and he tries to cover it up as best he can.
We both
understand that having “Al” in the house, so to speak, is not shameful. Alzheimer’s is just a cruel disease with a
random need to destroy. If we just give
up and lie down, Al will run over us and we’ll wind up with tire marks on our
foreheads.
So we’re
exercising, eating healthy, and laughing as much as we can. It may be a short term strategy, but for right
now it’s working. All the little things,
the ones that used to drive me crazy are really “mox nix”. (Well, that’s an exaggeration. The crumbs under the kitchen table still set
me off.)
I miss the
planning and plotting for house flips, and Joe reminding me that we’re over
budget, again. I miss those long conversations
about life and kids and work. I miss
arguing with Joe about why he shouldn’t run for political office and why I
could never be a politician’s wife.
(Don’t get me started.) Those were the things that made us a couple. The
thing is, I can remember that couple and sometimes Joe can’t.
I think memories
are possessions that you don’t think about until you really can’t think about
them. Think about it.
I’m going to
the grocery this morning. I’ve got to
remember to buy Joe a comb. They keep
jumping out of his pocket. I wonder how
many times a day most people say the word “remember”.
