Looking Back....Clues???

The other day I was walking my dogs and began to think.  Uh oooh.

It was approximately 10-12 years ago when I began noticing Mom growing a bit vague in her thinking.  Some things just weren’t adding up correctly.  Yet, in my mind, I gave it over to the aging process...whoops!

I recall bringing some videos on my visits to see Mom, some were older but she hadn’t seen them for a while, and others were newer.   She’d remark that she hadn’t seen even the older ones before and I thought it odd, but carried on, believing the viewing would refresh her memory.  It didn’t. 

Next, she began having troubles with her computer.  There was the incident where her printer wasn’t working and, luckily, before she headed out to buy a new one I came up and plugged it in - it had been introduced to the plug but wasn’t completely inserted.  We had a laugh over that one.  

There were more incidents where her computer “simply won’t work”.  So, I’d come up, as did various other people, and we’d get it running but then she’d forget.  Hence, I emailed her, mailed her, and printed out (while I was there) instructions for her.  Her issue, now, was she would put them all in the round file, as she hated clutter and thought the instructions unnecessary.  So, she called in experts and sent it into the shop.  Still, she couldn’t manage to get it to work. 

These may have seemed small at the time, but they progressed.  There was the time when she caught my house on fire.  I had taken the dogs for a walk after dinner, and brought out the cooler for her to load her food from the refrigerator (she’d been a while at the beach house and spent some days at mine on her way home.   So, we put the food from the cooler into my fridge to keep it fresh, against her objections that the cooler would suffice for 4-5 days - another clue).  When I returned 20 minutes later, flames were leaping out the kitchen window, smoke was billowing out the front door, and she was standing in the hallway with a bowl of water saying, “I’m so sorry!”  Fortunately, I was able to extinguish the fire with baking soda, but the cooler had melted all over the stove, the counters, the floor, and the sink was melted.  Smoke damage was throughout the house, but there was no structural damage.  

What she’d done was put the cooler on the stove as it seemed to have more space to open the top.  Inadvertently, she’d turned one of the knobs through  a bump or something while filling it.  Then she left it there to go into the living room to do a crossword.  It wasn’t until the smoke was filling the air and the detector had gone off that she realized something was amiss. 

After, she denied the incident to me, telling me it had been my negligence for turning on the stove to get it ready to make tea for when I came home.  Wha----?????

There were also times when she began to create stories about people - stories that weren’t true, but she believed them to be so. This was evidence of the hallucinatory state, coming from her dreams.  Soon, these stories carried much weight, and they became the norm - with more embellishment even though none held any merit to those in the know.

Then, eventually, came the realization of her not cleaning the house, the dishes, etc., but her house still seemed to be managed, even if the dust collected more and more.

Of course, this all grew to a head when her confusion increased to a point it could no longer be unchallenged. 

But it began with little things that one normally tosses aside as “just one of those days”.   

It does make one ponder a little more when little things begin to occur….