VASCULAR DEMENTIA IN THE ELDERLY: THANK GOD FOR WATERMELON ANGELS

This is the fourth of a series of six posts on symptoms of dementia delineated in a Johns Hopkins special report Guide to Understanding Dementia. The information from Johns Hopkins will be in quotes for this post with personal information following.

"SPATIAL ABILITY AND ORIENTATION" "Driving and finding one's way in familiar surroundings become difficult or impossible, and the person may have problems recognizing known objects and landmarks."

Related to driving, this particular symptom either did not show up, or was indistinguishable because our mother had never had ANY sense of direction and NO ability to navigate anywhere but known routes. Again, we felt we were lucky.

Going out of town, she always rode with someone else. But about the time she was getting fully into the symptoms of dementia, there was a tragic circumstance in the area where an elderly woman became lost in her car and died, maybe as a result of exposure. There are numerous dangers attendant to this symptom as the person could die of exposure in cold temperatures, dehydration in hot temperatures, be at the mercy of persons with ill intentions, and a number of other dangers too difficult to contemplate and too numerous to expound on.

Later in the illness, the actual night before my sisters were coming to take her to the doctor for further assessment of her mental status, she decided to take a walk. For months before this, she had not left the porch or yard area, so we were not worried about this particular thing, focusing instead on hazards around and in the house. She left the house where she had lived for almost 50 years and walked down the road about 1/4 mile. She turned around to walk back because it was getting dark.

She became disoriented, but kept to the pasture fence that ran alongside the county road. Then she decided she needed to get out of the road and tried to climb through the fence but fell and hurt her ribs. She was very likely directly in front of my brother's house, but he of course didn't dream that she would have ventured out on the road as she had not done that in several years. So no one in the family found her.

The next morning my sisters arrived to take her to the doctor and found her under the sheets in her bed, moaning slightly, with rock and grass covering her legs. She had managed to change into her nightclothes. Unsure what had happened, they were able to piece together the story in bits.

Mother stuck to her story that a young man hauling a load of watermelons had stopped and driven her back to the house. We could never confirm this. The road is low traffic and definitely not on the way to any major market, but she stuck to this. We called him our "watermelon angel."

After a trip to the emergency room, where it was determined that she had bruised or possibly cracked several ribs, her long independent run of 87 years came to an abrupt halt. She was not left alone after this, and we realized that we were very lucky that nothing more serious happened. It was late June, about seven years into the symptoms.

Note: I want to say again that this is our personal experience. Someone may read it and say we allowed our mother to stay in her home far too long, at some personal risk. While that may be true, I can also say that other families,(and I have had occasion to deal with many families in the throes of decision-making related to an aging parent), walked this tightrope between allowing the parent independence and forcing their hand for change.

DEMENTIA HINT: If your parent is still at home, go through the house and assess the dangers. Make a list, and correct what you can. Think of the house as you would when you are childproofing.

There is a service that allows your parent to wear a necklace or bracelet that will allow them to call for help, simply by pushing a button. There are some complications in using this service with a dementia patient, so a physician would need to evaluate whether it would be useful.
Installed