Grumpa Joe's Place

Yesterday, John Dean, a lawyer from the Watergate-Nixon era testified before Congress. His mission was to bash Trump and to point us toward impeachment. What really pissed me off was not that Dean was a credible witness which he is not, but that the news people kept telling me that he is eighty years old. So what? The implication was that being eighty makes one unknowledgeable and not credible. I’m over eighty and I believe I can keep up with the best of the younger generation. Not only that, I hang with a group of men in which I am the baby. Any of us would be capable of debating any newscaster in the country. We keep abreast of the news, and we regularly debate current issues all while remaining friends.

Aging definitely comes with problems, many of them are memory related. Those of us who are lucky enough to retain our minds live active cognitive lives. One thing for sure, we aged have to put up with too many memory loss jokes, although I find most of them hilarious. When one experiences age related memory problems as I have, the age jokes don’t seem very funny no matter how true they may be.

I happen to live with a wife who is one of the unfortunate aged who has lost her ability to remember anything. The sadness of her disease is that she is at a point where she has given up chewing and is now forgetting how to swallow. Think about that one. Try eating (baby food) without being able to chew or swallow. Her best meal these days is breakfast. She seems to be most functional after twelve to fifteen hours of sleep. She eats a decent breakfast but then goes downhill from there refusing to eat either lunch or supper. Some men consider me lucky since she has been unable to speak for over three years.  Speech is a valuable function we take for granted. For instance, she cannot tell me how she feels, or what hurts. The only sound she can make is a siren like whine when we (me and her caretaker) move her to change her. I have to read her body language to get an idea of her situation.

My advice to people these days is to pray for a quick death. People who drop dead instantly receive a gift from God. In my wife’s case she is the opposite. Looking back at our history together her first symptoms began to appear seven years ago. She is at a point where the skin on her lower extremities has very poor blood circulation and the result is she gets pressure sores that cannot heal. One doctor told me that her disease is terrible because the brain dies before the rest of the body. I agree with that assessment, but will add to it. When the body does begin to fail it does so in a slow creeping manner. The life force of blood is needed to support major organs so body parts like toes, feet, legs etc. lose.

My philosophy is to give her the best drug-free quality of life possible. At this point the quality is in how comfortably she sleeps. When my beloved sleeps twenty-two hours a day, and is frowning the whole time she is in some kind of discomfort. Right now I am wrestling with a decision to use morphine to ease her discomfort. I get an argument from her caretaker that morphine will make her to sleep more and accelerate her death. The hospice nurses argue that morphine merely relaxes a person so they don’t fight so hard to live with pain. The relaxation allows them to pass comfortably and peacefully. One argument I make with myself is that if she is no longer eating or drinking, and sleeping twenty-two hours a day what difference will it be if I administer morphine and she sleeps twenty-four hours in peace.

Filed under: Aging, Biography, health care, Seniors | Tagged: aging, Alzheimers, Decisions, Dimentia |