Digital Chasm

Found dad up before me again, he had managed to change the TV to the country music channel that plays country music videos pretty much all day. I have spent the last 2 hours trying to convince him that it’s just a music video channel. It’s not cable TV or a video that someone rented. He was going to wake up one of his grandsons to ask him if he rented it.  Note we don’t have cable or satellite TV.  I guess its okay, but since some of the people in the video are dressed for summer he is convinced that it must be some sort of soft-core pornography.  I guess if you are not having a good day with Alzheimer’s a 3 minute music video is a full length movie and as good to watch as anything else.

In hind sight, we have no idea how he survived how dad managed after the analog to digital TV transition, we sent dad the coupons for digital TV converter boxes but apparently he gave them away and we lived too far away, at the time to do anything more, and he said his TV was working fine.  When we picked up dad before we moved here we did talk to a neighbor that told us how he mostly just watched the one channel that still offered an analog TV programming which broadcasted primarily in Spanish with some shows in English or with English captions.  No idea why dad didn’t just go down to the store and buy a new TV or subscribe to cable TV, he had more than enough in savings to easily buy one and the thousands of TV commercials and the near nightly stories on switch over that described the process in great detail before the switch over should of given him some idea what was going on, but dad can be stubborn.  Sitting at home watching one channel mostly in a language he didn’t understand for hours on end surely didn’t help motivate his brain, I keep going back to the adage, if you don’t use it you lose it.

To add even more complication to digital TV is the whole channel dot or dash number channel thing is confusing as well. I guess as a major geek I never really considered how complicated the whole thing would be to someone with mental issues.  So now dad is trying to grasp the whole 4.1, 6.2, and 36.3.

Other channels that dad have found in the past were NBC’s weather channel that repeats the weather endlessly, with the first time giving local weather and the next segment would be weather for some other part of the nation so dad was convinced that we had some drastic weather or were due some shortly because he was watching it on the TV.

Dad is still confused about this channel, “I have never paid anything for TV or radio, I just don’t get it” I told him this is free over the air broadcast of country music videos.  Since dad was up to 10pm last night watching TV, well after sundown had taken over today could just be compounded by a bit by the lack of sleep perhaps a nap later will help things.

The Meeting

One of the side effects of both the Alzheimer meds, Aricept and Namenda,  he is taking is vivid dreams and Hallucinations. Thankfully so far Dad has only had vivid dreams that we have noticed so far.

Tonight 2 hours after going to bed, after having a good, ate all 3 meals and went shopping at whole foods. He woke up and came into the living room talking about canceling a meeting that was supposedly going to occur sometime tonight, he was a bit confused. After sitting and talking about it for a while he realized it was just a dream. We shall see how the rest of the night goes. But in the past it usually happens only once.

Dad really liked going to whole foods, it’s really cool in that it just doesn’t have an escalator that he hasn’t seen in a while, but that is mostly due to not going to places where they had one. he really didn’t do much shopping in department stores for quite some time. Our whole foods also have an escalator for the shopping carts that he got a big kick out of. I was a bit concerned, because it was getting past his dinner time and dad has a habit of saying it’s too late to eat and not eating dinner which only makes things worse, because then he is a stubborn  grumpy hungry Alzheimer patient possibly with low blood sugar. The saving grace of whole foods is that they were having lots of things to sample and apparently it was enough to fight off the hunger that leads to the evening issues, and dad ate a good meal at home as well, even though it was after 7pm usually it’s a loss cause if we don’t get dinner in him by 6pm.

Dad over estimates my computer skills

Well after a night of prime time CBS TV shows with 200 sexual innuendo jokes per half hour filled with 100 commercials per show, dad accused me of using my computer skills to generate those commercial filled TV shows to make him angry.  Sory I am a system administrator, not into video or graphic design I dont have an artistic bone in my body.  I wasn’t even watching the TV,  it was what the wife and family was watching, if he didn’t want to watch the shows he does have a TV in his bedroom, that is he learning how to use and we would have been more than happy to put something he wanted to watch on.

I dare not showing him MythTV, a Linux based software to record and play back TV shows fetch music and news streams and web content from the internet. Who knows what he will think what I am capable of then,

Sauce == Greasy

We were able to piece together a bit of something the other day; dad seemed to think that any sauce covered meat is greasy. We figured this out by him mentioning that barbeque chicken on a TV commercial for some restaurant, don’t remember which one. He said look at all that grease, I said no that is barbeque sauce, he said, “It’s the same thing.” We tried convincing him that it wasn’t. The problem with this, is that he doesn’t like meat that is tough or dry, but doesn’t like sauce or to spend a lot of money going out.

Also a few weeks ago we took him to endless pasta at Olive Garden, We thought he was okay while eating it, but soon after he began calling the Olive Garden a greasy spoon restaurant and was just about the worst place he had ever been.  Now if you haven’t been to Olive Garden, it’s a Italian restaurant serving and not a greasy spoon in fact pretty much the opposite in that most of their sauces are made with vegetable and there isn’t even butter on the table and no real fried foods or french-fries to be found except for perhaps a veal patty. I think being overwhelmed by the 5 pasta choices along with 5 sauce choices they gave him pretty much completed the bad experience.

The contradiction of this is that one my dad’s favorite meals at family restaurants is broasted or fried chicken despite being cooked in oil. So Barbeque sauce or spaghetti sauce that are mostly fat free and vegetable based are “greasy” but chicken coated in flour to absorb grease and fried in oil is all fine.

We use Restaurant.com certificates quite a bit, which allows us to eat great meals for only a couple dollars more than McDonalds prices, we usually pay $2 for a $25 gift certificate, the only requirement Is that you have to order $35-$50 in food to get the $25 off. Yes these tend to be nicer restaurants, so dad gets sticker shock looking at the prices in the menu, it’s almost like he becomes a dear stuck in the headlights. Yes the meals cost $15, but after 1/3 of a $25 gift certificate is about $8 off each meal, the $15 entre turns into a $7 meal about one or two dollars over what McDonalds prices not including the 18% tip, but being in a nice restaurant and being served is worth a few bucks and better for your health as well compared to French fries and a burger.  After much coaxing we are usually able to get him to order something, but its usually a bowl of soup or a small sandwich.

The other trick we learned is to give dad a few choices of what to eat, he as with most Alzheimer’s sufferers get confused by lots of choices, 2-3 choices work best for him.

I guess to wrap things up, eat early, sun downing and restaurants don’t combine well, give only a few choices, and perhaps don’t even give him a menu, yes these seems wrong but in the end it works out better for someone that rarely goes out and recalls prices from 30 years ago when a cup of coffee and a bowl of soup was less than a $1 including a decent tip, than current prices.  And gets overwhelmed by more than a couple choices. 

Status Report

Well it’s been a while since I have posted, I guess we got in a rut, things were going pretty smoothly, buying the healthiest breakfast bars that we can buy at Sam’s Club, dad is heading 5-6 of them a day, so it doesn’t make sense not to buy the largest boxes we can find, despite the fact that dad says we can’t possibly eat them all. Even eating 5-6 breakfast bars each morning still hasn’t kept him from eating his breakfast that usually is a hash brown patty, two eggs over medium, and two small sausage patty. Occasionally we mix things up by serving corn beef hash or scrambled eggs and ham.

He is doing well on his new medication that requires him to drink 8-10 ounces of water with each dose.

Getting him to eat lunch, and dinner is getting easier, the day goes much better if we get him to have dinner else he get stubborn and insists on going to bed really early, sometimes as early as 5:30pm despite the fact that the sun is still out, sometimes he wakes up in a few hours and we get him to eat. If we get him to eat all three meals he manages to stay up to 10:00pm despite having a big day and was unable to take his normal cat naps.

We have also purchased him a couple of new flannel sheet sets for his bed, and a heavier comforter allows dad to sleep better, sometimes sleeping as late as 8am.

On our to do is to him a heavy winter coat to go with his fur lined hoodie and long sleeve shirts we have gotten him already.

The Missing Day

Well one of my Dad’s favorite things to do in Milwaukee is going to the farmers market on Saturdays, yesterday, Saturday, we went there as usual. We didn’t buy much, just some carrots, both regular orange carrots and a few yellow carrots as well. We also bought a large head of cabbage and some wine sap apples that dad remembers from his childhood.  He had a good time. So good in fact that he expected to go again today despite us telling him that its only on Saturday he is still insisting on going again, says he doesn’t remember going, still doesn’t believe us, despite showing him the carrots, cabbage and the apples we bought there.

Firing on 6 cylinders, just a different 6 cylinders

Dad made his way to the living room at about 8am today, Sunday, the day after his long day, farmers market and the trip to Wal-Mart for new tires, and being up till 10pm and back up at 3a.m. He wasn’t wearing his pants; he usually is fully dressed whenever he is in the living room, including socks and shoes. But today he didn’t have any pants or socks on, he was wearing underwear. He was mentioning that it seemed cold this morning; I got him to go into his room and put on his pants while I put on a pot of coffee.

When Dad came back he was wherein his pants, and was looking around, so I asked him what he was looking for, he said his socks, I told him they were in his bedroom in his dresser, and he went and found a new pair and put them on.

Then he told me about having a flat tire at the farmers market yesterday, which is pretty good lately his short term memory has been failing him, so either the new meds were helping or it was a major event for him. Most of the time it takes him 5 or 10 times for him to remember something, it has to become a long term memory for him to really be able to remember it and use it.

We shall see how he is the rest of the day, it should be interesting. It’s Sunday and football will be on but he really doesn’t care about sports but the rest of the family does but yet he still tends to stay in the living room instead of his room where he has his own TV and DVD with older movies that he likes.