JOAN’S BLOG – MON/TUES, OCTOBER 11/12, 2010 – A CLEVER DECEPTION

No one knows better than a spouse how clever our AD husbands and wives can be at disguising their symptoms to the outside world. How many of us have silently screamed in frustration when a friend or relative says, “Well, he/she seems fine to me. He/she doesn’t have Alzheimer’s Disease. I don’t see anything wrong with him/her.” I fired the last doctor who said that to Sid while I was sitting there.

This weekend I was surprised to realize that my husband is deceiving even me. We went to see the movie, “Wall Street, Money Never Sleeps”. (I had rented the old one, which we watched last weekend in preparation for seeing the new one. No, I didn’t expect him to remember it, but neither of us had seen it, and I wanted the background.)

On the way home, I asked him if he liked the movie, to which he replied in the affirmative. I then said, “It’s never going to stop, you know. It’s worse now than it was in 1987 when the first movie was made, and it’s going to keep getting worse.” He said, “Yes, it is.” I was referring to the greed portrayed in both movies. I am not sure what it was that made me ask the next question. A glaring light bulb did not go off in my brain. It was more like a little spark, but I said to him, “ You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?”  In a moment of total honesty and self awareness, he answered simply, “No”.

I could have taken it further, by asking why he had agreed with me if he did not understand what I I was saying. It would have given me insight into his thinking process, but I decided to drop it. I instinctively knew that he would either not know or not know how to express it, and it would serve no purpose except to humiliate him.

That incident made me question how many of his responses to queries about what he has read or seen are clever deceptions backed by hope that no one asks a follow up question. I usually am much more aware than others as to what he comprehends, but maybe I, too, am being fooled. There are times when I think he is not as bad as I think; that maybe I am with him so much, and see so many of his problems, that perhaps I am exaggerating. Then this occurs and I wonder if I am underestimating his difficulties.

I learned another lesson from this experience.  If he can deceive me, is it any wonder that he “seems fine” to outsiders?

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