Today, I made the mistake of giving Dad a boston cream donut. I warned him it was sticky, but I wasn’t expecting him to try to break it into bite-sized pieces!!!
Note To Self: Do not give Dad a filled donut unless you are also prepared to give him a bath.
Dad’s quote of the day “I’m really quite curious as to how much I’ve lost my ability to think.”
I never know what to say when he makes remarks like this – during the “bad years” of the AIDS epidemic, when it seemed like everyone was dying, I learned to be as direct as possible with sick people, even – or especially – about hard stuff, and that’s a philosophy that served me well over the years. Even last year, I was in the recovery room when Bob Kohler came out of surgery and the doctor started talking to him in medical terms, and Bob looked so confused that I just said to him, point blank, “Bob, he says you have cancer and it’s not curable. If you choose to have chemo, it will only be to make you more comfortable.” But Bob’s mind wasn’t affected – I knew he understood me. With Dad, I never know what he can understand and/or retain.
When I got to Dad’s apartment today, I heard a male voice droning on his bedroom. He was listening to one of his recorded books from the Library of Congress – I was relieved because he used to listen to them all the time, but he hasn’t been recently and I was afraid he’d forgotten how to operate the machine. It turns out that he isn’t enjoying the books as much as he used to. He says “I want something simpler than I used to be able to handle, but I don’t want to listen to baby stuff or silly stuff.” I don’t know how we communicate that to the library people – I know there’s some way to tell them what topics someone’s interested in – Dad’s signed up for history and archaeology and I don’t know what else, but I don’t know if there’s a way of specifying the reading level or degree of complexity. I guess I can call them and see. He can’t be the only one of their clients to experience this.
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