Unwanted attention

She stopped me on our walk today and pointed toward the Foosball table. "Wait," she said, "I need to tell you this -- one of those guys thinks I'm cute, and I don't want to have anything to do with that." She put her hands out as if to ward off something bad, and stepped away from the table.

"One of the Foosball players thinks you're cute?" I asked. She nodded yes, and made a face.

"Well you are cute, but you don't need that kind of attention from a Foosball player?"

She shook her head, like no possible good could come from that.

Bogart & Bergman

I was telling her goodbye, and that I would be back. "Not tomorrow, but soon..."

She interrupted to say: "Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but, uh..."

Amazing. With all that has been lost, the script of Casablanca is still in there!

Just my life now

I was driving away from my Sunday visit with May and thinking I really should call her Missouri friend Judy and give her a report. Judy is May's most loyal and thoughtful friend, and she's standing by her still. But I'm not much of a person for talking on the phone. I figured calling her was just another thing I should do but wouldn't -- and then, my cell phone rang. It was Judy. We talked about how May was doing and eventually Judy said, "Well here's how I'm doing..."

She had fallen and broken her shoulder. Had surgery last week, and now had to take pills (she's not a pill person) and do rehabilitation exercises (not that kind of person either). Said it all just "irritated" her.

"But I think about something May told me one time," she said. "It was not long after you moved to Evanston. I asked her how she felt about knowing that she had Alzheimer's, and she said, 'That's just my life now. I may not like it, but I wake up in the morning and I say, this is my life now, and if I can make it through this day I'll go to bed and wake up in the morning and it will be my life again tomorrow.'"

Judy said when it was time to take her pills and do her exercises, she thought of May and told herself, "This is just my life now."

Laughter, music and dancing

May was nowhere to be found when I visited just before lunch today -- but everyone had "just seen her."

"She was right here a minute ago," said Nicole, the staff person in charge of May's house. I took the opportunity to ask her why they had moved her to a different table in the dining room. Nicole said it was because they had noticed that May spent a lot of time visiting with a woman who ate at that table, so they thought it would be a good idea to have them sit together. "This other lady likes to laugh and joke," Nicole said. "And May, she likes to laugh and joke." Then she told me that they had just had a guest musician, who had asked May where she was from. When she answered "Oklahoma," the musician said she was from Oklahoma too and played a special song for May.

I went looking for her and ran into Max, the activities director. "She was just here," he said. "She was following me around." Then he laughed and said, "The musician played a song for her, Your Cheatin' Heart, you know--the Hank Williams song?" Yeah, I know that song. Max set off to help me find her.

I passed by the staff person for Country House, who said, "Hi Bill. She's over here in my house. I just saw her dancing." I headed down the long hallway of Country House and here she came in her bright red sweater, walking toward me from the far end of the corridor, a warm smile on her face.

I think she's getting the hang of it.

This year's critter

Sitting on a bench in a visiting area this afternoon, May looks straight ahead and says, "This is this year's colander...no...not that... Critter! This is this year's critter. They've all come out. They're all..." (and here she reaches out with her hands and shakes them back and forth).

"Are you describing something you're seeing?" I ask.

"Yes."

"Where?"

"Right there." She points toward a short table about three feet in front of us. It's surface is made of thin slats with half-inch gaps between them. A potted poinsettia occupies the far end of the table.

"Show me," I say.

She walks to the table and, again waving her hands around, roughs out a shape about the size of a large cat in the space opposite the poinsettia, then sits back down beside me.

"That's this year's critter?" I ask.

"Yes."

Activities room

They were getting ready to sing "O Come All Ye Faithful" when I showed up this morning. Max, the activities director, had distributed porcelain bells to a favored few, and I was happy to see that May was one of them. She was poised, bell at the ready, but suddenly everyone was calling her name and pointing toward me. She looked up and smiled, and searched for someone to take her bell.

We sat on the bench outside the activities room and she asked me what I had been doing.

A little hope

Looked in May's closet this afternoon and there were no clothes. Looked in all the drawers of her dresser--nothing there. Asked a staff person and she said all May's stuff was hanging in the laundry room. They keep it there now, because she was putting clothes on and off all day. Seen that, I said.

She'd wear three pairs of panties, two pairs of pants -- often with the shorter pair on top so you could see all four cuffs -- and usually three sweaters one on top of the other. They said they'd put her in her pajamas at night, and she'd take them off and sleep in a pair of slacks. Yeah, did that at home, every night. But they've put a stop to all that by taking the clothes away. Said she's more settled now, not nearly as restless. And she was. I'd already noticed it. "Settled" was a good choice of words. She smiled. Seemed relaxed. Very nice visit.

Stopped at the nurse's station on my way out and commented on the change. They said it's been like that for a few days now. Said they had changed the time of day they were administering some of her meds, thought it had "evened her out."

So they're doing something. Thinking about the things she does, and how they can change them. Getting her settled, evening her out. Day after tomorrow it'll be six weeks. There's an adjustment period, they said. Right, of course. Six weeks sounds about right. A little hope, for the first time in a long, long time.