The "A" word

Over the past few years assorted doctors have described my mother's mental decline as cognitive deficit, senile dementia and cortical shrinkage. Since I was not present to hear exactly what her doctors said, all I heard was my mother's version which was she did not have Parkinson's. Well, what she actually said was " I don't have that problem that begins with a P". Alzheimer's has been mentioned in passing but no formal declaration was ever made to me. I was under the impression that Alzheimer's was a premature senility developing when a person was in their fifties or early sixties. The diagnosis of Alzheimer's now includes the senility of the very old too.

There has been a noticeable decline in Mother's mental functioning in the past few weeks which has been worrisome to me. I finally mustered up the guts to look up the seven stages of Alzheimer's. I knew what the end could be like; however I just wanted an idea of how far along she was. She is a textbook case and has moved into stage 6. Some days she is remarkably lucid but other days I can't figure out what she wants to tell me. We've even resorted to a kind of sign language at times. Bless her heart, she works so very hard to figure out the day and month. I imagine the time will come when it becomes too great of an effort. It's really hard to say that my mother has Alzheimer's, but I sure as heck don't know what else to call it. I guess it will become easier the more I say it. One can hope.