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Grandma
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Grandma is 88 years old. Her hair is snowy-white, skin wrinkled and
teeth all but gone. She is also quite deaf. Otherwise she is strong and
active, often arguing with my mother over who should mop the floor.
The
doctor said she has Alzheimer's disease. In other words, she is senile. It is a sad fact but true.
The
one glaring symptom of her disease is that her memory is very bad. She cannot
remember things or gets them all mixed up. So she forgets where she has kept
things and often will frantically search for them. Then she forgets what she
is searching for, which adds to her frustration. When she misplaces her
spectacles, she will donsomeone
else's pair and happily go about the house. How she manages to see with the
wrong spectacles baffles me.
As
much as she cannot remember recent things, she can recall her younger days
vividly. She rattles off the
names of people she knew then and get my name and other family members'
wrong. She cannot remember whether she just had dinner but can remember an event
that happened fifty years ago. Sometimes she can be very difficult. Her being
almost deaf does not help matters either. We have to speak loudly for her to
hear.
Sometimes
she says we are scolding her. We shout to say we are not scolding her, which
makes things worse. We got her a hearing-aid. She would not wear it.
In
between bouts of crankiness, she sometimes seems normal. But this seems to
get lesser as her disease progresses. So we do our best to keep her out of
harm's way. We lock the medicine cabinet and doors and hide dangerous things
from her. It would be disastrous if she swallowed a bottle of pills or got
lost while wandering in the streets. The latter has happened before. A kind
neighbour brought her home.
It
is unfortunate the last years of her life has to be like this, but it is so.
We can do nothing but to help her along as much as we can.
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วันอังคารที่ 1 มกราคม พ.ศ. 2556
Grandma
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