Sitting in the posh Scottsdale waiting room, the cool blue and calming taupe color scheme designed to keep new patients like me from screaming out what is inside our minds. As they walk Mom and I back to the small one bed examination room, I can barely find room to put my purse down. I'm gonna want to take notes on my cell phone. We enter the room and Mom wants me to sit on the bed while she sits in the chair next to the mobile desk shoved in the corner of this cell/room. The medical assistant takes Mom's vitals, making small talk and cracking jokes. She looks to be expecting but it's entirely too early to tell or make question about the matter, so we stick to conversation like the weather. Mom pays no mind to the tension surrounding my entire body, one of the signs I now know as whats to come. When the medical assistant leaves, it feels like eternity in the little room. I continue to make small talk with Mom, making silly comments on the sailing decor that was chosen for this particular room. Must've been a small boat.
Finally the Nurse Practitioner walks in. She's nice enough, an older lady but not by much, late sixties perhaps. She is very sure of herself, a tad haughty, but not in an elitist way; more along the lines of assurance than arrogance. She asks Mom a few questions, friendly questions, but I can tell she is still semi-inquisitive. When Mom answers, her replies don't exactly pertain to the conversation, another sign of what I already know. As the moments move on, and I am under the assumption that we are awaiting the actual doctor to join us (although I am unsure how we are ever going to fit another body in this cramped room), the NP starts in on the testing results. She jumps the gun on me so I missed a few of her very fancy medical words at first. When I ask for her to slow down she gives me side eye and slows her pace about one-tenth of a second. Thanks lady.
Almost without stopping on a beat she breezes past the information that we came to know.
So based on your fancy medical testing and all the bullshit we have put you through the last two months as suspected you have Frontal Temporal Lobe Dementia and specifically the most common Alzheimer's so we are going to go ahead and write you a prescription to help slow the process the best we can because fingers crossed there is no cure and well not much we can do. Any questions? Here, take a lollipop.
OK, so maybe it didn't go exactly like that. But she flew through the words Dementia and Alzheimer's as if they were apart of everyone's daily vocabulary. It was stunning and maddening and even though I knew it in my bones, it was still a gut punch to the system. While I was busying myself with trying take all the notes I can (and lets be real, I was trying not to burst out into tears and fall on the floor in the most dramatic way imaginable), Miss bedside manner over there was asking Mom all these important questions and laying down all the imperative rules like:
-You can't live alone
-You can't drive
-You shouldn't use the stove
-You need someone to give you your medications twice a day
-Make sure you eat for every meal
-Go to bed no later than 10pm
-Get up by 9am
-Get into a support group
Mom just smiled and nodded and said "My brother lives with me but he left and his friend is a girl and she is still living in my guest room but I don't know her name and my daughter said she has to leave because my other daughter has to move in". (Yes, that actually happened, long story for another book).
We were given our prescriptions, our next appointment was scheduled and we were quickly whisked out of the tiny chamber they call an exam room and before I know it we are back in the car sitting in traffic heading home.
The thoughts were racing through my brain on what we had just gone through. In such a short amount of time my worst suspicions were realized, and I was trying to wrap my head around how our whole world was about to change. Hard as I might the panic was starting to set in. She can't drive, she can't be alone, she shouldn't cook... she'll forget how to eat, she'll forget us, she'll eventually die from this disease.
I felt myself hit the accelerator as my blood pressure began to accelerate itself. I was angry, this was not fair. I had already lost Dad, now my Mom too.
"Can we go to Paradise?"
"What?"
"Can we go to Paradise please? I want that chicken salad sandwich on the brown bread."
"Oh, sure Mom. Do you know what you want to drink?"
"I'll get the lemonade because its sweet."
"Just like you."
Giggles.
To Mom, life had just gone by without a care in the world. She didn't realize, or maybe comprehend that everything was going to change, every day, sometimes bigger changes, sometimes smaller changes, but life as we knew it wasn't going to be the same.
Life as we knew it. Ah-haaa... for Mom, life wasn't going to change. She was going to get up and go about life carefree, whether we took the car away or not, whether someone was living with her or not, whether she was to get a chicken salad sandwich on brown bread or not. It hit me that she isn't the one who will suffer, it is us, her family, that has to watch her memory fade, her confusion to find her words, her sadness when he have to remind her that Dad is no longer here on earth with us.
This disease may infect one, but it affects all those surrounding.
In case you did know... I hate you Alzheimer's.
