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JOAN’S WEEKEND BLOG – OCTOBER  1-2, 2011 – DEFINITELY TIME FOR SOME HUMOR

These last 3 months have seen a lot of changes in my Alzheimer husband – none of them good. My blogs have reflected the sadness and despair I feel as I watch his decline. I cannot change the reality of his situation nor my emotional reaction to it. But I can dig down into my naturally sunny personality ( It’s still buried in me somewhere), and find a little humor in my AD life to cheer us all.

As you are aware from reading my blogs, Sid can watch a TV program four times or more, and have no memory of it. Recently, we started to watch an old episode of Two and a Half Men on one of those Marathon oldies channels. Since I thought I had seen every episode of those shows, I was surprised to find that I had missed the one that was being shown. A week later, we hit that oldie channel again, and they were showing the same episode we had seen the week before. “Oh no”, I lamented. “We just saw this.”  And my AD husband said, “How come I don’t remember it?”

Last night, we were having dinner at my cousin’s house, a 45 minute drive from us. After dinner, I gave Sid Advil for his knee pain and his dinnertime diabetes pill. He said he had put two Advil in his shirt pocket before we left the house, so he would not take them, since I had just given him his evening dose. 10 minutes later, he asked me if he had taken his Advil, then took five minutes to hoist himself out of his chair onto his walker, and slowly pushed the walker, heading for the living room. I stopped him, and said that we had to leave now, before it got too dark, as I have trouble driving in the dark. This same man, who can’t remember something from 10 minutes ago, and can barely walk, said to my cousins, “I can still drive. She’s just too stubborn to let me.” 

My 93 year old father is generally still fairly sharp in many ways, but definitely slips in and out of dementia-like episodes. For those of you who are unfamiliar with my situation, he lives in the ALF next door to me. He called me this week. This was the conversation:

Dad: Who is this? Who am I talking to?
Me:  It’s Joan
Dad: No it’s not. I want to talk to you know who.
Me: Uh, no. I don’t know who. This is Joan.
Dad: No, I want the other one.
Me: Arlene? (my sister)
Dad: No. The other one.
Me: Well, you only have two daughters, and I’m Joan.
Dad: (Laughing) Oh, yeah. Joan. You’re the one.
Me: What’s up?
Dad: I think “Ruthie” was a lesbian.
Me: Huh? What? (She was a friend of my parents 60 years ago). She’s dead, and what’s that got to do with anything now?
Dad: I was just thinking about it. I think she was a lesbian.
Me: Okay, anything else?
Dad: No.
Me: Okay, bye.

Do any of you remember the old TV show – The Naked City?  It always started with the voiceover – “There are 10 million (I don’t remember exactly how many they said) stories in The Naked City. This is one of them." Well, folks, there must be a million stories in The Dementia City. I have given you three of them. What about you? Do you have some dementia humor to share with us? We could certainly use it in the midst of all the sadness.

MESSAGE BOARD: Joan’s Weekend Blog – Definitely time for some humor.

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The Alzheimer Spouse LLC
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