Oct 2, 2010

Daily life

"The one who loves the most will live the most," Dr. Ernest Holmes.

After just getting such good news about Dwane's improved cognitive ability from Mayo, he is doing worse. Perhaps it is the new sleep agent, or perhaps it is part of this insidious disease which is characterized by significant changes in lucidity. Yesterday he got himself into a difficult situation and could not make sense of how to best handle it. He seemed to have forgotten how to operate a machine he had just used. I found myself discouraged that he was, for yesterday, in about as much a fog as two years ago. It seems that I know intellectually that this is a terminal illness; but when his condition worsens, I am discouraged. I'm not sure how to prevent these emotional ups and downs with hope and hope discouraged. I was speaking to another person whose spouse has early dementia. In frontal lobe dementia it seems the person with the dementia is not as discouraged nor experiences as much fear as the caregiver.

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