In the past, before AD, since my husband retired, he would wash our bed sheets and pillow cases on Mondays. He vacuumed on Tuesdays and Fridays. He took the garbage cans to the curb on Thursday nights. Now, my sheets get washed at least twice a week (but rarely on Mondays), he vacuums when he remembers to do so, and three days last week I had to bring the garbage cans back up from the curb because he took them down on the wrong days. Because he has lost the memories of what "remote control" and "plate" and "glass" are, as well as the names we call most other objects, we can laugh about the clean sheets and my almost daily trek with the cans. I just feel so sorry for him losing so much of himself piece by piece.
The days of the week have been gone for a while. We put the cans out on Tuesday night. They literally are picked up in the middle of the night and most weeks we wake up to empty cans on Wednesday morning. My husband starts asking when we put the garbage out as early as Thursday some weeks. I'll get the same questions once or twice a day until Tuesday comes.
Because we GOT TO DO IT NOW, I always include the "after Supper" part of when they go out.
My husband still vacuums, but only if I ask. It has been at least 6 months since he recognized that it needed to be done.
Garbage days have been like a comedy of errors here for some time. Every week we have recycling and green bin and every alternate week it's also garbage and yard waste. No matter how I have tried to explain the ins and outs of this it's always the same question each Wednesday and I have to sort through the green bin to make sure there is no garbage( there often is). I call myself the garbage police but I don't mind- it's one of the least bothersome aspects in dealing with this disease.
This is scary=when my husband was still at home I made signs reminding him which day was recycle, trash or lawn clippings. Now that I am doing everything myself I find myself relying on the note.
Last Sunday evening my DH asked me if it was October? His birthday is in October, and his son had given him a little present for Father's Day, which brought the 'is it October' question. It isn't just the days of the week, but time - if he naps and it is light out he isn't sure if it is morning or afternoon or nighttime.
I always relied on notes. In California some weeks it was one kind of container and other weeks it was a different one. We had a total of 3. They finally gave up because no one could keep it straight and had us put all three out if the two recycling ones were nearly full on any week.
Relying on notes is OK. With dementia you don't remember to LOOK at the notes. It was how the therapist was able to tell the difference between a possible small stroke and dementia.
Starling, I wish they'd given up the strange trash schedules in my part of California. The black containers (garbage) go out every week, while the blue containers (recycling) and the yard waste every other week. Also, certain kinds of yard waste cannot be recycled, so they have to go in the black container. The day of the week may change, if there was a holiday during the week. (That's a Government holiday, you understand, not the handful of holidays the rest of us working stiffs normally get.)
My husband still (mostly) remembers what day, but which waste goes where ... ? Hah. We have blue waste cans in the house for recycling material, but even matching blue with blue is getting beyond him. And when I try to make sure the yard waste is being handled properly, I may get him to put everything into the right container, and even get the right containers to the curb, but he may subsequently get it into his head to dump the contents of one container into another when I'm not watching.
I figure doing it right 90% of the time is pretty good. Diving headfirst into those containers to sort trash isn't very appealing, although I've done it when things got REALLY messed up.
i only wish my DH even knew that garbage had to be collected, sheets had to be washed, ever, or that floors needed vacuuming. Days of the week is not even an issue. H doesn't know what recycling means anymore, and I'm constatnly taking cans out of the garbage. On top of that, all those circulars and brochures that would be going in the recycling pile immediately, now go in his den in case he wants to read them. Then I sneak in when he's sleeping and put them in the recycling pile. How about bills from 8 years ago, when he was still handling the bills. i'm busy shredding them. And I don't feel like doing anything.
My husband decided that we needed to take the real garbage out to the big container every day and that nothing was going to go into the can in the kitchen. That was so he only needed to take the kitchen trash out once a week.
I did manage to arrange it so that most stuff went into some kind of plastic bag BEFORE it went into the big container. If we put everything into the kitchen container we might need to empty it twice a week. I'm beginning to slowly change us into a more rational system and I think I might be succeeding.
He handles the recycling pretty well. We keep a cardboard box for the cardbord and he puts that out once it gets full. They recycle newspaper here, but not regular paper. He double wraps the newspapers in plastic and half a dozen ties. NOT a great idea, but I've decided to live with it while it lasts. He won't put the can and bottle container out. He plastic bags those. So far they have been accepting it as recycling. Which is making my life easier.
Days of the week have been gone for a long time, his excuse, he's retired so why does he care. Same thing with seasons, what city we live in etc. He has an excuse for it all. I put the recyle out on Thursday morning before work. When I come home most of the bottles that I recycled are back in the garage. It's a vicious circle. I put them out he brings them in. He's afraid we will need them someday and not have any.(go figure) He also collects ice cream containers(the paper ones). He wants to put stuff in them. Luckily his sister comes to see us every couple of months and while I keep him busy she takes big black bags and gathers up the recylables and the ice cream containers, puts them in her car and gets rid of them. Otherwise I wouldn't be able to get in garage. It sure is strange the quirks they develope. We have to laugh.
I check to make sure DH has put the trash bin out on Tuesday nights ever since the time I had to put the bags in my car and dump them in a big dumpster at a nearby apartment complex. Fortunately, no one came and chased me away! I guess I can laugh about it now, but at the time it wasn't so funny. I can't imagine having a system as complicated as CA! Yikes! That's confusing, even for a person without AD.
I don't think he's known the days of the week for awhile. He was laid off from his job years before the diagnosis, and had trouble remembering the days even then since he didn't have a regular weekday/weekend schedule.
What got to me recently was realizing he doesn't read the paper anymore. This is a man who used to read it cover to cover. I asked him the other day if he wanted to read the Sunday paper. He just said, no I don't really read it, just the sports page. And I know I haven't seen him read the weekday paper in a long time. I think I'm going to cancel it. For some reason, I found this "revelation" devastating, like a kick in the gut. Another big piece of who he was gone.
Sometime back I realized DH was not reading the paper. I leave for work early and so it wasn't till I realized that everyday the paper remained exactly where I had left it .. untouched. And yes, it made me sad. Another small thing Just being taken away from him.
It seems these days, everyday some memory, skill, ability falls away from him. Months are gone, followed by days of the week. I think this is a relentlessly sad disease....
I treasure this one place to talk about it and grieve together. I so appreciate the honestly of all of you who post.... On some days the posts and blogs are so very sad that I think my heart will break and then someone tells a funny story or just reminds us all to laugh...and it helps.
Just last week I followed the thread about confabulation, but didn't add because I had never experienced it. Then on the weekend I over heard my husband tell our daughters an elaborate story about a trip we took that never happened. He later told them that when he asked me about it, "mom didn't remember!." Sometimes you do have to laugh
I agree, this is one of the things that's a rueful laugh rather than an enormous annoyance, but it seems to happen to all our spouses. Sometimes mine will read an article if I specifically tell him I've left the paper open to it for him to read. Day of the month I can understand losing; we all do when we're retired. Phone numbers - well, I don't know the phone numbers of any of my 3 kids but they're written down by the phone and programmed into it. Our recycling and garbage happen on Monday usually at an early hour except that there are a lot of Monday holidays, so then they happen on Tuesday, when, because it's a double shift, they can be VERY early (annoying, because if you put the stuff out overnight the coons get into it) or VERY late, whereupon DH looks for the truck to come all day until it does.
So far, though, I've found one bright side to things: my husband takes so long to get dressed, with me coaching most of the way, that I read the paper in the quiet spots, more thoroughly than I have in years!
I find it easier to just do everything myself. My DH wants to help but it is just more difficult guiding him that I can't stand it. I feel bad because he wants to help. Even just bringing the groceries in from the car is a monumental task for him. Taking the garbage out - too confusing.
We don't have a problem with garbage and recycling since we just put them outside the door of our apartment. Today, after shopping, I handed DW the bag of Depends and asked her to put it on the bureau in our bedroom next to the partially empty one. She left, apparently wandered around with it for a while, then returned it to the kitchen where I was putting away the groceries. I asked her again to take it to the bedroom, so she went into the den. This is in a 2 bedroom apartment with every room very close. As Hildann said, sometimes it's easier just to do everything myself.
It is so much easier to do everything myself. I try to give him a simple job---take the magazine into the living room. He doesn't know where the living room is---when I point to it, he tries to walk through the kitchen cabinets to get there..then he drops the mazagine and when I tell him to pick it up, he says something about the pickle...it becomes a real "who's on first?". The language skills are so deteriorated. He doesn't know what I'm saying and lately, I don't really know what he's saying much of the time and he gets annoyed that I don't know. I try to fake it, but he asks me a question and waits for an answer. I know...just wait a few minutes and he will forget!
My DH needs a 'reader board' to magnify to read. He still gets three magazines, but I can't see renewing the subscriptions. Most of the time I see he has the front magnified on his name label. He seems to spend as much time looking at that as turing the page to any of the articles...
My DH has been an avid reader all of his life. Other than playing bridge (which we had to give up two years ago), reading a book was his favorite pasttime. For the past year he has been re-reading his favorite books, I think because his comprehension was going and he could remember his older books and so by re-reading, he could remember the stories and gain pleasure. In the last months, he has been "reading" less and less. About two weeks ago, he stopped even trying. As to the newspaper, he also was one who read the paper from cover to cover. Sunday papers took hours! In the past year, he only read the sports, comics and the editorials. Now he sometimes will glance at them, and sometimes doesn't even try to read them. It is so sad.
At this point my husband gets 5 papers a day. The local paper is delivered. The other 4 we get on a trip to the local WAWA each morning. I doubt if he is actually reading any of it at this point, but he goes through the motions and sometimes brings me the paper to show me a funny picture or article.
Today two of the New York papers had photos of a duck family crossing Park Avenue. I think he realized that they were photos of the same duck family but he did bring me both of the papers separately. Sometimes he will be upset by a story and if it is a national story he won't remember that I've already been told about it in the New York Times, The Post and the Daily News, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the local paper, The Morning Call. Each time he finds out that someone famous has died, or there is a flood in the Mid-West, it is new.
Frankly the newspapers are excessive. He actually bought yet another one (USA Today) on his 2 hour walk yesterday. I won't mind when it stops because I really don't think he is reading them.
The book reading stopped completely a couple of years ago. He was never a big book reader but there had been some books he had put aside to read, or read again, when he was retired. We gave them away more than a year ago.
He hasn't seen a movie in over a year. We used to get him Sunday Ticket (for all of the football games). Last season he didn't watch the special channels unless our daughter was there. Too confusing to watch the channel with the live highlights that he used to love. I cancelled it at the end of the season. I cancelled the movie channels too. At one point we got all of them because that was all he watched.
When the penny poker started at our clubhouse he didn't want to play. That surprised me too. He used to love it.
In fact, if there was a very early, pre-accident and pacemaker, symptom of his dementia, it was that he didn't want to play cards in Las Vegas when we went there in the middle-90s. He also wasn't reading those books. We were buying them and setting them aside for retirement. Since it is quite possible that my husband has both VD and AD those might have been early signs of the AD portion of his illness.
I try to read to my DH on a daily basis. Sometimes I pick something that is well written and read to him and then continue on myself, since I doubt he really has the memory to follow the story line. I usually read for an hour or a chapter, depending, and sometimes he is fast asleep. Still, I think it is worthwhile and is something we can do together. Right now we are reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (Barbara Kingsolver) and it is really making me miss growing my vegetables and I fantasize about having a few chickens!
My DW used to read all the time. When we moved into our present retirement home last September, her immediate comment was that she would spend all her time in the library. She often tells people how much she likes to read. The truth is that she has not read any book in over a year, and then only ones she had read previously. She never goes to the library. When I am at my desk, as typing this, she just sits in her chair watching me. I often give her a magazine, book, or newspaper. She will look at them for a few minutes and them put them down. It's really sad to see these changes, especially since she was such an avid reader with a photographic memory.
My DH has not read for years, he was blinded in WW2, and althought he regained his vision, subsequently, he needed 2 cornea transplants. One, the first that he had in 1957 or so was one of the very first they did, and it didn't really take. The second , in his right eye he had in 1970, right before we met, and it worked, but his eyes get very tired so he reads very little. The one thing he does read, is his Memoirs. I encouraged him to write his Memoirs several years ago, and I'm so glad I did, He's amazed that he wrote it, that he remembered all that stuff, but it gives him his life back. Now I'm sorry I had him stop in 1971, when we met. But honestly, I don't think he could have gone further. By the time he got to 1971, you can see the difference in the writing. It's much more disjointed, and when I typed it for him, I did a lot of corrections. I was going to have it selfpublished, but I just tell him to proofread it, and I correct it. That way it keeps him thinking he's doing something useful, getting his book ready to publish.