The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [35]
May 29. Mom was in a foul mood today, again. Among other things, she accused me of “ripping off” her stuff, including her shower cap. She then concluded a long and scattered tirade by saying that I should “fire the bloody postman for not bringing the bloody post every day.”
June 12. Been trying to stay out of the sphere of Mom’s anger the last few days, without much success. Dead tired all day, worse than usual, could barely move. Seem to have forgotten how to sleep. On a video I got from the Canadian Alzheimer’s Association, a woman said that when she was taking care of her husband she didn’t sleep for three years.
June 15. Mom wandered again tonight, turning on lights in room after room. Wearing a poppy on her nightgown. In June.
June 21. Summer solstice, longest day of the year. Found almost $3000 in Mom’s drawer, in twenty-dollar bills. When I redeposited it at the bank, the teller told me that last year Mom had been going to the bank every day to make withdrawals. When I asked the teller why she didn’t report it, she said she did, to the manager, who reported it to her brother-in-law in New York. Also found an envelope containing forty-eight Super 7 lottery tickets, which I just finished checking out on the Internet. Won 10 dollars and 2 free tickets.
July 2. The burglar alarm woke me up last night, at midnight. I jumped out of bed and scrambled downstairs in my boxers. Before I could shut the alarm off, there was loud knocking at the front door. I didn’t know what to do, with the alarm still going, so I turned the outside light on, looked out the window and saw … Mom, elegantly dressed in a pin-stripe business suit. I let her in and then shut the alarm off. By then the Étoile Security people were calling to see if everything was OK. I was shaking when I told the guy what had happened— and almost couldn’t remember our password! After I hung up Mom explained that she was on her way to school and had come back because she’d forgotten her notes.
July 15. Mom is now registered with the Alzheimer’s Wanderers Program, and wears an ID chain.
August 20. Been busy renovating. I changed the dead bolts on the front door and the kitchen door to double key locks. I also papered over the doors. And made lots of other changes around the house. Dr. Vorta gave me some ideas, the Bath Lady gave me others. But I’m too tired to write about it.
August 22. Dr. Vorta gave me a list of ways of keeping Mom active, mentally and physically, and more changes that should be made in the house itself. As for treatment, he says there are essentially 4 drugs to treat Alzheimer’s. And they’re not terribly effective—at best, they mitigate symptoms. I’ve already tried two: Exelon (rivastigmine) and Reminyl (galantamine, first derived from the bulbs of snowdrops and narcissi). Both modulate the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. But neither stops the progression of the disease, and there are side-effects: nausea and vomiting, stomach cramps and headaches, diarrhoea, dizziness, fatigue, insomnia, loss of appetite …
September 21. Autumn equinox. Been trying two new anti-aging neuro drugs over the past few days (neither available in Canada—thank you, Dr. Vorta!). One is Centrophenoxine (Lucidril), a carboxyl-linked dimer (two molecules linked to a C=O group by a –O- connection) of p-chloro-phenoxyacetic acid and DMAE (DiMethylAminoEthanol). The other is Hydergine (Ergoloid Mesylates), a mixture of alkaloids that come from a fungus (ergot) that grows on rye. One of them seems to be working, in any case, because first at dinner and then at bedtime, Mom was astonishingly clear.
“What poem shall I read tonight?” Noel asked his mother. She had been particularly lucid that night, especially at the dinner table, going on at length about one of her favourite books, The Golden Bough. She was now in bed, ready for her bedtime story.
“I don’t want a poem tonight,” she said. “I want to hear about the Struldbrugs. Because I think I’m turning into one.”
“The Struldbrugs?