VASCULAR DEMENTIA IN THE ELDERLY: WHEN REASONING IS IMPAIRED

This is the third in a series of six posts with information taken from the Johns Hopkins Guide to Understanding Dementia.  Information from the Guide will be italicized, and the additional information is from our own personal experience with our mother's long trek through dementia territory.

ABILITY TO REASON

"The person finds it difficult to respond appropriately to everyday problems, such as a flat tire.  Or, a previously responsible, well-adjusted person may display poor judgment about social or financial matters."

I believe our family was lucky in regard to the latter part of the above symptoms.    Our mother's normally adequate social skills stayed intact, and she transferred her financial matters to a trusted daughter when she realized she was no longer able to competently handle them.

The idea of losing the ability to respond appropriately to everyday problems manifested itself in all sorts of ways.  Each time we visited mother either weekly or in my case, monthly, the car battery was dead.  We always jumped the battery, ran the car for a while, and had it in working order when we left, only to find it dead on the next trip.  We realized during this time that she had almost quit driving.

A month or so prior to the car being dead on arrival each visit, she had a wreck and ended up giving a man a check for $200 rather than call the police or insurance.  "He was in a hurry to go to a funeral," she reported to us, and he had pressed her for a decision.  That would never have happened prior to the dementia.

She didn't want to get the very large crushed-in place on her car fixed, either, but we insisted.  One day was spent searching for a hubcap to replace the one that flew off after the fender bender.  She had decided that she liked the way it looked without a hubcap.

There were other problems even more pressing than the car.  We often spent the night at her home.  It was a long ranchstyle with three bedrooms and a bath on one end, her room being separated from this part by a small distance.  One night while visiting, my college age daughter woke me to say that her eyes were burning and watering, and she thought she smelled fire.  It took me only a few seconds to recognize the odor.  I grew up in the country; my daughter didn't.

It was skunk scent,  so strong that it made our eyes water.  We got up, moved to another part of the house, took all our clothes to the car, and tried to figure out what we had to do.  The next day we moved to my mother-in-law's house nearby.

We hired a pest control company to trap the skunks and remove them from under the house.  I am not exaggerating when I tell you that they removed 15 skunks and one feral cat.  It took several weeks, and unbelievably, the skunks returned the next spring and tried to set up housekeeping again.  We phoned our best friend, the pest control guy, and he again trapped skunks for several weeks, this time getting only seven.  Although we had him put wire around the whole base of the house, which was old and was pier and beam foundation, they had dug with a dogged determination to return to their birthplace, and some succeeded.  It felt like being under attack, but Mother was oblivious. 

She had simply been living with the odor, not realizing, since her sense of smell was compromised, that her clothes and home at times smelled like a skunk den.

Around this same time, we had an infestation of ants in the windows, not termites, but daunting still.  Our much loved pest control friend helped us out again. 

We had to arrange for repair of her back porch on one visit,  when it was noted that the floor was "spongy".  My brother ended up taking out the larger part of the back porch down to the flooring studs and replacing all the underlayment and flooring. Mother admitted it needed to be fixed, but I suppose the hot water heater would have fallen through the floor before the problem really got her attention had we not attended to it.

During this same time, she had stopped using the shower in one bathroom because it was leaking and caused the problem on the porch. She didn't resume using the shower even after she was told she could.
Just to make sure we got everyone in on the action, my brother-in-law was assigned, no, he actually volunteered, to repair the bathroom.  He got all the needed  supplies, spent  days hammering, sawing, nailing, repairing the plumbing, and when he finished, Mother had come to the conclusion that she would not use that bathroom any more, and she didn't. 

DEMENTIA HINT:  Try to enlist the person's cooperation in any project, but don't get mad if all the effort seems wasted at the time.  It's just part of the confusion that surrounds dementia.






Installed