Things you can't anticipate...

Here it is the end of March and I didn't even check to see when my last post was. Life With The Parents gets more interesting/problematic as time goes by. It seems, here lately, that every day has more challenges than we've had in the past.

The symptoms of Dad's Parkinson's are accelerating. He doesn't exactly hallucinate but he's not always in the present. As the disease progresses the brain allows the mind to take snippets of things that happened in the past, one from this situation one from another, and put them together to create a whole new reality for the patient. A few days ago it was a story about my son being set up for something that was going to "come down and cause trouble" maybe landing him in jail and certainly to be in the newspaper. He wanted me to come over and talk about it because he didn't want so say anything over the phone. Last night he insisted that he needed to call his former military bosses and let them know he has Parkinson's because they might not want him working anymore. He hasn't worked for them in 30+ years. Most of them are either retired or passed away. It took a lot of talking, coaxing and convincing to get him to leave it alone.

Each day is different from the one before. Usually, by the next day, yesterday's problems are forgotten and new ones crop up. But not always. Last week he had it in his head that someone from Salt Lake was going to send someone from the Philadelphia Bishop's storehouse to get his safe. We almost didn't get through that one without a phone call. The next day he didn't clearly remember what the issue was but that his safe was still there.

I had to take him to the doctor last month because of the edema in his feet. It was pretty bad so they have us wrapping his feet and legs during the day and this next week we hope to graduate to compression socks. It's hard because if he would walk more and move around more the problem wouldn't be so bad. The progression of the Parkinson's makes that impossible.

He's very frail and has lost almost 10 pounds in the last 3 or 4 months. He eats less and less. Terri makes sure he gets his fruit/vegetable green drink every day but that's as much nutrition as he gets. Some days it surprises us that he makes it through the night and others he seems fairly cognizant and almost chipper. He talks a lot more about "as this winds down" and last night he said "there are worse things than being dead". When my daughter looked in on him this afternoon, because it was almost 1:00pm and he still wasn't up, he popped his head up and said "I'm still here!"

I feel bad for Mom because she isn't mentally up to par and she's totally at a loss when he wants to make these weird phone calls. She just doesn't know how to handle the situations so she gets a little panicky. She is really weighed down with trying to take care of him but not really being able to do much.

So here ends another briefing of what's up with us. We continue to plug along taking each day as a new day and thinking mostly in terms of just one day at a time.