![]() ![]() I have lived it in all its unpleasant and hurtful details. There are many books on the subject, but I don’t want to read any of them. It was the signal that she was near the end, and I didn’t realize it til too late. Pocketing food means that the patient can no longer swallow and the food accumulates in the cheeks of the mouth. My mother was very smart, even with Alzheimer’s, and was frequently getting away with things like that – like when she managed to figure out how to unlock her seat belt on her wheel chair and suddenly stand up – a real danger to herself and to others, believe it or not.īut no. ![]() In my ignorance, I thought she was literally putting her food in her pocket, which she had done on many occasions before. Just two days before she died, we got a phone call that she was pocketing her food. Then, when she was put into a Broda chair and was no longer walking, it was obvious that she was not just mentally failing, but physically failing as well. I had clearly seen her decline become precipitous in the previous few months. I wasn’t surprised to hear this back then. She didn’t think that my mother would live out the year – the clearest indicator of the end, she told me, was when the patient stopped swallowing. It was about a year ago that her doctor took me aside, and explained to me that my mother was in the end stage of the disease. There are major milestones of the condition, however, that are relatively the same across the board. Through each agonizing stage of its progression, there are no clear guidelines, because every patient is different. It is an unforgiving and terrible disease, and leaves the person you have loved all your life, unrecognizable. Frustrating that no one, except the Public Health Nurses who came and went, understood the toll it took on us. It was frustrating that neighbors and distant friends and relatives, didn’t see the changes that we did. My family watched her lose herself and tried to keep things normal for as long as possible. She lived with me and my family – my husband and two girls, for most of those 19 years – except for the last four years that she spent in a nursing home, in a locked ward. My best guess is that it began about 19 years ago, after she was in a terrible car accident – she was never the same after that. I’d been fooling myself for years that I was prepared for the end… I was not.Īt the time that she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, the doctor told us that the disease starts long before the symptoms show. Knowing all of this, her death still came as a knockout of a shock to me. It was to be expected, I suppose, at her age of 91 and because of the fact that she’d been sick with Alzheimer’s for more than a decade. ![]()
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