Baby Love

One thing I have discovered is that caring for an Alzheimer's patient is much like caring for a young child.  People with dementia do become child-like, and their responses to everyday tasks can become very much like dealing with a strong-willed 3 or 4 year old.  Yesterday Mother was wearing a lovely watch.  It was not hers, and none of  the staff knew where she got it.  But Mother sincerely told me that she got it from her grandfather at the train station.  She didn' blink an eye because to her it was the truth.  I have carried virtually every piece of clothing and personal effects into her residence, and that watch is not hers.  No one can get it off her arm without a fight.  She loves it.  So now she is a thief.  Well, maybe not because she doesn't know that it isn't hers.  Alzheimer's blurs the sense of right and wrong.  All she knows is that she found it, she liked it, she's wearing it, and she believes it was a gift.  I can't make her return it like I would insist a child do.  She has no idea where she got it.  We will have to wait until shower day to get it off of her and turn it in to the lost and found.

She is often incontinent, and even with her "pull ups," she often soaks through.  Virtually every morning her bed it wet.  Many times I find her clothes wet when I visit.  Nothing makes a person move faster than sitting down on the bed next to her and feeling the seeping wetness on your own clothes. It disgusts me that the staff doesn't always notice, so I know she has been in wet clothes for some time.   That is one reason that I do her laundry.  Wet things can sit awhile and the smell is overpowering,  and she can go through two or three outfits on some days. That means four or five loads of laundry a week and using borax to neutralize the odor.  It can feel like caring for a child who is being potty trained.
Yet despite the disgust of wet clothes and the ethical problems of  her taking what she sees, I love her.  It is like baby love.  The small child doesn't know what they are doing.  She doesn't either.  A small child can be taught.  She cannot learn, and in fact the problems will increase.  So love is unconditional.  Love learns to laugh.   Love cleans up.  Love shouldn't complain, but sometimes I do.  But I always come back to the love.  I can sit and watch her sleep, and like looking at a sleeping child, I love her peaceful face full of the innocence of dementia, and I love her.