Snarling Snakes

Even with his language problems, Dad still uses the word “defenestrate” in conversation, talking to Kate S. on the phone. They’re talking about cats, but Dad keeps getting confused, using the word “Kates” and “cats” interchangeably. All of a sudden, I hear him say, “how much do you weigh, or don’t you care?” to her. Apparently the idea of never asking a woman her weight has gone out the window, along with the idea of wearing pants to open the door.

“Kate wants two books,” I tell Dad. “They’re about vampires.” “I don’t think I like talking about vampires – ewww,” he says. I never knew Dad was squeamish about anything. When the sewer at the old house backed up into the garden, Dad would put on his Gloucester-fisherman hip-high boots and go shovel it up, and when cheese in the fridge grew green and fuzzy, Dad would just slice off the bad part and eat the rest. Apparently vampires get to him, but in true open-minded Unitarian style, he says “But if she likes vampires she can get vampires.”

Getting out a Good Humor bar for Dad, I notice the slogan on the box, “Brings back the Memories,” and start to laugh. If only . . .

Dad is pondering the ancient couch, which is really more of a daybed. “They lie on it and they’re more discomfortable when they lie on it than if they’d stayed off it. It’s older than the civil war,” he says. Our friend John, who lives in Gloucester in the house Dad grew up in, has agreed to drive down to NYC and take it back with him, thus clearing the way for the new sofabed. You can’t just throw out something that’s been around since before the civil war.

“You know what amazes me and bizarres me and crazies me?” Dad asks. “They have things in the middle of things. They can be handled and they can’t be handled and then they disappear. I can’t see anything there, but if I look long enough, I see a thing.” “What kind of thing?” I ask, confused. “A weird thing. I wonder what happened to it.” He peers into the empty space in the middle of the room. “Maybe I’m going crazy. Twenty minutes ago I looked and there was a whole picture with snakes and whatnot and it’s gone now. I don’t know where it went. There was a whole picture and it was snarling.”

Hallucinations, especially of snakes, are not a new symptom of Dad’s – they appeared pretty early on and were one of the things that prompted me to get the evaluation which led to his diagnosis. He used to say he saw snakes lying along his bookshelves, but it’s been years since we heard about the snakes. At the time, I wondered to what extent his failing vision and his developing dementia were intersecting to create the false images. I searched the medical literature, but only found one article on the subject. But, as his eye doctor theorizes when I talk to him about it, the optic nerves are part of the brain, and maybe there’s a sub-type of dementia where they fail first. I met someone the other day who told me their parent had a combination of blindness from “glaucoma” and Alzheimer’s, just like Dad. What if some people’s optic nerves are degenerating as part of a dementing illness, but they get lumped into the glaucoma category? Dad’s intraoptic pressure was below normal as a result of the glaucoma treatment, but still his vision deteriorated, frustrating his eye doctor tremendously.

While I’m typing this, a silence has fallen, which Dad breaks by leaning to one side and saying, in a strange voice, “Hello, hello, hello.” “Dad?” I ask “what are you doing?” “I’m talking to the cat,” he says. She’s across the room, not paying him any attention. I put a pillow in his lap and then the cat. They look very cute together.