The Journey Begins

This journey began over ten years ago and probably even before then. It all started with a trip to the emergency room. Mom had been staying with me while my father was undergoing treatment for cancer; he was staying with my brother. This was in the middle of 2000. Everything seemed to be going okay considering the circumstances.

One evening, Mom complained of dizziness. One look at her eyes going back and forth told me something was very wrong so my son and I loaded her into my van and took her to the emergency room.(Doctors, nurse practitioners and nurses, please take note: bedside manner means everything in an emergency especially where elderly parents and children are concerned.) Mom was whisked off for testing and scans and brought back into the room after what seemed like a very long time.

"She has dementia and water on the brain." The person who told us this was abrupt, unwelcoming and had no compassion whatever. Perhaps she was having a bad day. Maybe somebody squashed her puppy that evening, I don't know. All I know is she zoomed in, dropped the info and left. She made no attempt to explain anything other than to say that nothing could be done but there was medication for the dizziness. A nurse came in with a prescription and we bundled Mom back into the car and went home.

Dementia. All I could think at the sound of that diagnosis is that my mother is not crazy. Dementia; demented; loopy; not all present...etc., etc., etc. I really had no idea what dementia was, only my childhood memories of people talking about demented so and so and how weird he or she was behaving. I thought I had been told that my mother had lost her mind. I knew that wasn't the case. I needed to find out for myself what was going on.

The first thing I did was look up the word "dementia" in the dictionary and find out exactly what it meant. The definition was unsettling, but not nearly as bad as what I had imagined. Mom had not in fact lost her mind. However, her memory was going and some of her abilities would be leaving as well. To a certain extent the diagnosis meant she was in the process - the slow, long process of losing bits of her mind. But I chose not to dwell on that. I focused on the memory loss piece and decided that we could deal with that. And so we did. And thus began our journey down the winding, ever changing road in the dementia dimension.

The intent of this blog is to help someone out there who is facing the same challenges my family and I face. It is also a vehicle for me to share some of the insights I've gained during this journey. It continues to be an interesting pilgrimage with unique stops along the way and I pray that someone who just entered the dementia dimension or maybe even someone who's been here a while will receive a little gift of knowing that they are not in it alone and that the things you feel are natural and normal. I'm not an expert, but I am my mother's child and I am doing all that I can to make sure this time of her life is as comfortable and pleasant as possible. Welcome to the Dementia Dimension!