As a kid one of my favorite movies was Disney's Pollyanna. I have 2 brothers and each weekend we took turns picking 1 movie to rent. I guarantee that my brothers were not thrilled when each time it was my pick, I picked Pollyanna with the occasional Annie thrown in the mix. Who knew though how all those hours clocked watching Pollyanna and her sunny outlook on life would affect my own.
I am writing this blog because I feel there is a need. I am in my mid-thirties with 2 young children and my mom has Early Onset Alzheimer's. She is 66 now and has recently moved into an assisted living home. She was diagnosed almost 2.5 years ago and to put it mildly the past 2.5 years have been a struggle. So if someone else can read this and know that someone else has been through some of the things they are going through, I will be happy.
My family is dysfunctional and yet shockingly functional. I think we have been through so much dysfunction in our lives that we can power through situations that would bring others to a halt. Long story short, parents are divorced, have been most of my life, mom lived alone never remarrying.
About 3 years ago I started noticing that my mom was having alot of issues with her memory. My grandfather had Alzheimer's disease and I feared all of the things I was seeing within my mom definitely were pointing to that. I tried to convince my brothers that mom had early onset Alzheimers, but they thought I was crazy. Time went on, my mom's memory worsened and I began pestering my brothers more and more that she needed help. Sidenote: My mom is not particularly warm and fuzzy, more like cold and prickly. She has a good heart, but she is not an easy person to talk to. I always have been and always will be scared of my mom. So the thought of approaching my mom a convincing her to go to a doctor to have her memory evaluated was terrifying.
I lucked out and my brothers agreed to talk to my mom if I actually took her to the doctor. I outsmarted them though. I made the appointment and took my mom to the doctor, but I played good cop and pretended that I was just going to satisfy my brothers' crazy thoughts about her memory. :) The doctor performed some tests and agreed it appeared that my mom did have early Alzheimers, but said there was always the chance it was something else causing the memory issues and so she wanted to run several blood tests to rule everything else out.
About a week later, I was out for a walk and my phone rang. It was my mom's doctor, she was going over the blood results with me explaining that everything looked normal physically and that she was indeed giving an official diagnosis of Alzheimers. As she was telling me I kept hearing an annoying buzzing in my ear over and over. My uncle was calling repeatedly. I asked the doctor to hold and asked my husband to call my uncle to find out what was so important. As I got off the phone with the doctor, my husband approached me. My father had a heartache and died minutes ago. In a matter of minutes, I had essentially lost both of my parents. My dad's death was sudden, but my mom's has been slow and heart-wrenching.
So back to Pollyanna. If you haven't seen the movie, you should. Pollyanna had a rough life but always tried to see the good in a situation. Over the past two years with everything I have encountered with my mom's Alzheimers, the best way I can approach things is to think it could always be worse. There are so many people in the world who have been dealt an even worse hand, so I have to be happy for what I have. This philosophy keeps me from going crazy. So that's my first piece of advice for you.
