Today is Sunday

Kyou ha nichiyoubi

My dad has Alzheimer’s.

We got his official, board certified neurologist’s diagnosis earlier this year, but we’d suspected it for a while. It was not a pleasant process, but we (meaning my mom and I) wrangled him into the university hospital’s neurology clinic and got the official verdict. We (also my mom and I) made him return his driver’s license.

All this is stressful. I will rant about it later. But today was funny, and when something funny happens in a situation like this, you enjoy it because you have to take what you can get.

My mom planned a day out with her friends. She’d go to lunch and then do stuff and come back at around five. She’d been looking forward to it for weeks. The Pumpkin Daddy and Prince and Princess and I also had stuff planned for today, but I worked it around my mom’s request to go check on my dad a little after lunch to make sure he’d eaten the lunch she’d prepared for him and taken his meds.

My mom called me at around ten in the morning to say that there was something wrong with my dad, that he kept coming downstairs from his room asking if it was time to go to the hospital. My mom would point at the calendar and remind him that his appointment was on Wednesday, today was Sunday, and that she had told him about her plans to go out with her friends and that the Pumpkin Prince would come over after lunch. Dad would go upstairs, and then, after a few minutes, return downstairs and ask if it was time to go to the hospital, and my mom would say exactly what she’d said five minutes ago, and he would go back upstairs. Lather, rinse, repeat. I could tell Mom wanted me to stay with Dad the entire time she was gone, because he was acting strange (well, more so than usual) but I couldn’t reschedule the stuff we’d planned, so I told her so and felt super guilty about it. Mom was really disappointed, but she said she understood.

A few minutes later, Mom called again, She sounded really happy. “I’ve figured it out! Everything is fine!”

Apparently, Dad had torn off September from his calendar, forgotten that he had, and peeled off October as well. So, he thought today was November 1^st (a Wednesday) as opposed to October 1^st (today, a Sunday). He would come downstairs thinking that it was Wednesday, the day of his hospital clinic visit (which would be correct if it actually were Wednesday, but it wasn’t), have Mom correct him, look at the calendar in the living room, see that it was Sunday, go back upstairs, do whatever (watch cat videos on his computer, I guess), forget about the interaction he had with my Mom just 10 minutes ago, look at the November page of his calendar, think it was November 1^st, and go back downstairs to ask Mom when she was going to drive him to the hospital, be shown by Mom that it was October 1^st, repeat. “So I found the calendar page for October in the trash can in his room and taped it back on the calendar, and now everything is fine!”

“Oh, I’m so glad. Have a good time with your friends!”

And so she did. I’m glad, because she deserves it. When I went to check on Dad, he’d eaten his lunch and had even done the dishes. He tries. When he remembers. And when he can control his emotions. It must be hard when your intelligence is your only asset, and you are losing that, and you know you are losing that. But it’s also hard for your caregivers to get yelled at when they are only trying to keep you from harming yourself.

But today was funny. My mom figured out and solved the problem. And we know that he still knows how to use a calendar. We have to take what we can get.