Pets Mart

We have a pet shop here in town where we buy our parrot mix and turtle food, often on a Saturday while we're doing our grocery shopping and other errands in town. The shop also stocks mice and rats for feeding snakes and I have been known to bring one home for Elder Daughter's little pet. When you enter the shop, there is a rather large and obvious Dinosaur looming to the side. It may not be noticible unless you enlarge the picture - but the middle front tooth on the lower jaw is missing. Instead of the white fang, there is a hole in the jaw. I hadn't noticed it really.

Until Elder Daughter mentioned the tooth and told me she was there when it happened.

Turns out, the dino-dentist is a member of our family and holds the dual position of being her youngest son. He was just touching the tooth, happened to pull on it and it went flying right out of the dino-mouth and landed at some remote location. The whereabouts is not known. The area was briefly scanned. The tooth wasn't spotted. She and the boys hustled out of the store. They periodically return to shop and each time, the gap in the jaw tempts youngest son to touch the space and quietly remind his mother that he was the one.....

Further Deponent Sayeth Not.

You have to laugh, or else.....

Things sometimes get interesting around our house. Especially when it comes to T.'s memory problems. I'd like to share some things that have brought me to the edge of patience - until I take a look from a different angle. Then I may laugh about it.

There's something called Perseverating -which is when you keep dwelling on one thing. You talk about it over and over. It could be as innocent at the next NASCAR race scheduled or as complicated as the directions from our house to Wal-Mart. You just keep repeating such things until they are settled in your mind. Or until you pick up on the verbal edge in your listener's responses. Regardless of the event - we eventually wind up on the proper television channel or else in the parking lot at Wally World.

Hoarding.
Apparently we are short of canned cold drinks in the whole world and can't allow them to be out in plain view in the kitchen floor. We tend to shove them in a line against the hutch and cover them over with a layer of plastic bags.
Out of sight, out of mind? Maybe.
Unwilling to share? Maybe.

Whatever the reason, we have wound up with 6 cases of Sam's Club soda hiding in plain sight and 3 packs of frozen pancakes (72 total) shoved into the freezer. I need to cross stuff off T.'s list when I know we absolutely don't require more.

Losing things.

We have missed the following items and searched for them for extended periods of time.

Mobile Phone #1.

Mobile Phone #2 that replaced #1.

AAA Batteries

The hood release location on the Buick

The door to the side yard.

Laundry detergent.

All items were subsequently found; some requiring repairs. (the hood release quit working after being jerked upwards several times. The auto repair fixed it for us)

The latest item that went missing last weekend was a white dustpan. T. couldn't recall where he put it last and searched the kitchen cabinets, the bedroom, the utility room and under the parrot cage. He did mention that he might have taken it across to the barn and left it there. I showed him a red dustpan that clips onto a red-handled broom and stays in the kitchen. The red pan wasn't what he wanted. It was the white one, the one he always uses.

Yesterday, Elder Daughter had come over to use my computer and I got a text message from her. T. had found the white pan. He brought it over from the barn and hung it up in the family room. On a nail. Which he had banged into the mantle of the fireplace. When I came home that evening, the first sight to greet me was a white dustpan hanging beside the entry door - swinging from the mantle. T. took it down - not without my strong urging.

We will dedicate a prong from the over-the-back-door coat rack to hanging the white dustpan. You can hardly see the nail hole in the mantle.

Enexpected

You plan your life and live it and then one day you reach the age where you can see retirement over the hill. You think how nice it would be to rent an RV and travel a bit. Or take a cruise to nowhere. And then something happens to change your plans.

T. has been complaining of his memory getting bad and had mentioned it to his doctor at the VA. Doctor sloughed it off as normal ageing. Every body's memory gets worse and they get older, he said. Still, after complaining and getting nowhere - I went along on one of T.'s doctor visits. I expressed how much the memory problem worried us both and the doctor gave a sort of standard test right in the office. He told T. Draw a clock. Put the numbers where they belong. Draw the hands at 10 to 5. T. couldn't follow the directions. The doctor referred us to a psychologist at the local VA. She was very pleasant and after her battery of tests, she talked to both of us in her office. She had found some areas that concerned her. T. was losing some of the skills in areas of the brain that enable a person to put things together in a limited amount of time. Or figure out how to combine simple irregular shapes to resemble a square or a triangle. She referred us to the VA in Gainesville but cautioned us that it could take some while to get an appointment because there had been personnel turnover and they were backed up.

We went home to wait it out. Time passed and Christmas and New Years came and went. Still no Gainesville notice of appointment. T. had to go to the eye clinic - which he did by himself. He lost the car after the visit ended and had to have the guard drive him around until he spotted the Saturn in the lot. He drove home with his eyes blurred. A couple of days after that he complained that his eye was burning. I looked and the left lid was swollen up. He said he hadn't rubbed it - all the while he stood there rubbing the lid. It hurt and swelled nearly closed. My son in law drove T. to the VA to see his primary doctor for his regularly scheduled visit and I think that's when the doctor realized that something was indeed wrong with his memory. As it was described to me, T. stood in the waiting room, explaining that he was there to see his Dr - Dr Ngo, and all the while he was speaking to the gentleman but didn't recognize him. Because my son-in-law pastors at a local church and the doctor's nurse-receptionist attends that church, she was able to tell the doctor that he could rely on Richard's veracity and that what the family was experiencing wasn't just in their imagination. There really was a problem. Dr. Ngo gave T. some antibiotic salve for his eye and said he wanted to see him back if the swelling continued. The salve worked.

A week later, I received a phone call from the social worker at the Gainesville VA. She said they had been contacted by our VA and had scheduled an appointment. She explained how the visit would go and told me that the neuro-psychologist would speak with T. and me and then after that, she and I would go to another office and T. would go through testing with the doctor. They had scheduled out a block of 3 hours for the whole visit. The appointment was set for 2 days before T.'s birthday.

Came the day of the VA visit, I drove to Gainesville. T. said he didn't know the way; didn't think he could find the VA - it had been so long since he had driven there. We met one of our daughters at the hospital and while T. was testing, she and I sat in the social worker's office and spoke of how things might change and of what steps we needed to start taking to prepare. She gave us a lot of good resources for caregivers and set up a medical power of attorney for T. to sign once she found out that he hadn't signed anything detailing how he might want to be treated in the event of a major illness. She said she believed he could sign it and understand it but if we waited too long, he might not be able to make his wishes known and without a power of attorney, nobody else could act in his stead.

When T. and the doctor finally came down from testing, they sat in the social worker's office and the doctor got right to the diagnosis. She didn't pull any punches telling us that she found T. to have mild to moderate Dementia/Alzheimer's. She was straight-forward and matter-of-fact in her diagnosis and for that, I was strangely grateful. She and the social worker gave us business cards and she recommended another medication that may be of help in holding the memory loss at a stable point - she said to see about getting Dr. Ngo to prescribe it. He hasn't yet. I will be calling him back to see if he has done anything about setting things up so that T. can start on this medication along with the one he is currently taking. The social worker explained things to T. and he initialed then signed off on the power of attorney.

We had lunch after the doctor visit. Sarah paid for Olive Garden and we had a lovely meal there. After we were done in Gainesville, I drove back home marvelling at how pretty the countryside was. I have always liked to drive through scenic landscapes.

I went to work the next day and thought I'd be fine but cried every time I talked with anyone about the diagnosis. I was just an overflowing bucket of tears - talking to Sarah. Talking to Susan. Talking to my boss. Talking to some of the secretaries. I don't know how I made it through that day. Susan called my brother and sister for me. I told her I just couldn't do it right then, that I knew I'd break down. She offered to make the calls and has been a real rock of support.

Sarah and Rich and their two boys helped us celebrate T.'s 74th birthday on the Friday. I took everyone to Applebees and in the course of the meal I may have compared the lunch in Gainesville and T. said he didn't recall going to lunch at Olive Garden. I was a little upset but Sarah took it in stride - she said it had been a long day for him and he was tired in the afternoon, so that may be part of the reason he didn't recall the event.

My brother and sister are major support givers - I know I can call on them for a sympathetic ear and a virtual hug in time of stress.

For right now, things are going pretty well. I'm still working and T. isn't driving by himself. We just celebrated our 36th anniversary and there's a quarter sheetcake on the dining table waiting for grandchildren to take another slice.

We still laugh together at the same things. I showed T. the bruised spots on my left arm where my purse slid down - I asked him did he get marks like that from banging into stuff. He said he did and proceeded to point to brown spot after brown spot - in a kind of "I dare you to disagree" manner.

I told him, "Those aren't bruises - they're age spots." He said, "They're what?" I said, "They're age spots. You know, they're those marks that - when you connect them -they say you're just so dad-blamed old!"

He ducked his head, but I saw the grin before he hid his face.

Finally done with that curve swerve!

At last, the county Public Works department has finished straightening out the S curve in our road by removing a tree. They responded to a neighbor's complaint about a pecan tree that has been successfully dodged by drivers on the road for at least the last 15 years. The neighbor's contention was that the tree presented a hazard. It was really a blessing in disguise because it caused folks to slow down a little as they zoom zoomed along. I have only seen one person nearly come in contact with the old tree and that was years ago.. It was a female who was driving a station wagon. She was going a little too fast and a wheel caught in soft dirt causing her car to spin around in the road. She came to rest with her headlights facing the tree while her tail lights pointed towards our house. She never drove the road that fast again.

After the guys from Public Works cut the tree down to a mere stump, a contractor came out and dug the roots out and pulled the stump from the ground. He also up pulled our concrete boundary marker and the white PVC pipe that was next to the marker. He left the marker and pipe lying where they fell. T went across the road and put the marker back in the hole.

In a few days, the county again came out and spread black dirt from the beginning of the curve to the end, along the whole length of our property. Ugly? Oh, it was ugly. We are so used to seeing the light brown dust of the road that the extreme blackness was just hurtful to the eyes.

A day or so after that, the big trucks came back and began dumping lime rock on the road - right on top of the black dirt. That would be okay, if they had merely laid down a thin layer. Nope, they mounded the lime rock up at least 6 or 8 inches above the ground level. They didn't allow for a driveway slant or any place for a driver to pull off the road. I think they're waiting for us to drive our cars and compress the lime rock to a level that is easier to manage. Right now, we have to go uphill to get on the road from the driveway. Forget coming off the road into the drive. We find ourselves slowing down to make the drop-off so we won't get a flat tire.

If the road doesn't compress much, maybe they'll bring one of those roller machines to run back and forth and flatten the lime rock enough for a person to come and go safely.

Oh, yes - and now, instead of a lovely old tree at the curve - we have a few white posts with yellow reflectors that line the road so that drivers will know to turn the wheels. Oh, well. We can only hope for seedlings along the roadside that will eventually grow into Pecans. Or Oaks. I'd take a Mighty Oak right about now.

I can still recall how good "normal" felt....

Just a musing that floated up from the recesses of the old brain. I recall after Hurricane Andrew how good it felt just to get a newspaper delivery. Everything was wiped away and we had no lights or water and every tree in the back yard was blown down. Still, there was the paper, lying on the walk in its plastic bag. It was such an uplifting feeling - something in the city still worked the way it was supposed to.

Can you imagine how much more hopeful a feeling for New Orleans that their team gave them the immense gift of a Super Bowl win! Way to go!!!

What they didn't get....

I took the photograph this morning. It kind of looks like a war zone with the stump as the only casualty. The supervisor told me that the work crew is finished and now we are waiting on another contractor to come and remove the stump. This is a pecan tree. You can hardly pull the seedlings from the ground after the root has established. They are deep rooted things - they'll crack off at the middle rather than uproot themselves. I want to see this contractor. I wonder if he owns a big blue ox - possibly named Babe?

Getting a blow by blow account

Well, today is the day to say goodbye to the pecan tree across the road. The County Public Works came this morning and the crew started cutting the limbs from the top down. They will take out the middle at some point today and then dig out the stump. At the end of the day, we will have a smooth place on the road where this pecan provider and squirrel haven has stood for some years now. This graceful old tree has been standing by the roadside for at least the fifteen years we've lived in this house and from the size of it when we moved in, it was there ten or fifteen years before that. Hey, this tree could have been a tender green shoot when T. and I were first married. I want to be the one to see the first squirrel jump from our trees to the ones across the road - they used to sail between the near branches and move from tree to tree over vast distances. Not going to work next time.

The near branch from that tree that any squirrel planned to land on will be just a distant memory on the way to the landfill. Pecan wood burns well so some of the work crew may take a limb or two home for the fireplace. Everyone who found out the tree was coming down has expressed dismay over the loss. All except the neighbor who sent in the letter of complaint. We know who it is and he will never get another bag of our cracked pecans. Nor will he be invited over to harvest the nuts from the ground. This guy, who thinks it's better to smite a tree just to get a little further look down the road (rather than moving his driveway) - doesn't deserve pecans.

I don't know. Is that too harsh?