no words, no words

[ritaxis]

I've spent the last couple of days being a companion, sort of. Thursday was a nightmare and I thought I wanted to tell the whole story but I don't: suffice to say that my befuddled friend wanted to visit her husband in the hospital, and I tried to get her to wait until later when her daughter was going to take her, and she freaked out. But today she and I and her daughter hung out all day and we went to the hairdressers' early and she went into a sort of Zen state and she was happy the rest of the day and she was even all right when her daughter went out. So that was good. I'm feeling much better -- I was pretty sure that my befuddled friend would still think I was the bad woman who wouldn't take her to the hospital (if I had taken her there would have been another kind of fiasco -- I didn't know at the time that he was at the other hospital this time).

And I took a different friend to Qi Gong class and to buy a camera for her daughter who is graduating and getting engaged and going to Brazil. I got home very late both days.

And tonight I let the nice fellow take me to Santana Row which is an absurdly luxurious shopping center sort of thing in San Jose where you see outrageously expensive cars and people gussied up in surprising clothes, but the stuff you'd actually want isn't all that expensive. He was wearing his ugly black and white chef pants but he had a new haircut and so he didn't look like he had come out from under a bridge. We bought a new blender to replace the one that had been starting by itself when nobody was in the kitchen with it. And a springform pan for Zak who keeps asking me if I have one that he can borrow (nope, no springform pans here, well, except for the one I just bought for him). And I had a tuna nicoise sandwich and an amazing celery root salad which we spent a long time analyzing and trying to figure out the method -- the ingredients were obviously: celery root: olive oil: vinegar.

Last night we made rappini and pasta according to the Happy Boy Farms guy's instructions. Tasted wonderful but it was more fibrous than it ought to be, I thought. Just now looking for a picture of it I couldn't find any that looked like what we ate -- ours was really slender with fully-blown yellow flowers, instead of unopened green buds like broccoli. Maybe that's why it was fibrous.

I'm learning a lot about dementia, and how to simultaneously prevent/delay/prepare for it.

Comments

[marykaykare.livejournal.com]

I'm learning a lot about dementia, and how to simultaneously prevent/delay/prepare for it.

Given that my father, his sister, and their mother have all suffered from it, I'd be interestd in hearing what you're learning. Esp. the prevent part...

MKK

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

The first thing I've learned is that dementia is what happens if you get old enough. But it happens at different rates for different people. The trick isn't really prevention, it's delay: you want to delay it past the age you can expect to die. This is oddly comforting, because then you aren't thinking "am I one of the fated ones?" You're thinking about it the way you think about general health.

You already do the main things you can do. Attend to your heart and circulatory system, because some dementias (my friend's, quite likely) stem from small strokes. Have a rich and varied life, and don't get socially or physically isolated. My friend has never learned to drive and they moved on to a mountain out in the country which can only be reached by car. That was stupid.

Something I don't know how to do is exercise the memory. Somebody said somewhere that you should add a new hobby, vocation, or field of endeavor every so often (did they say decade or five years? It doesn't matter). Moderate physical activities. Unless you're athletic, in which case, be athletic, just don't get concussions.

And I think one should simplify one's financial and domestic life so that there's not a mess for the support crew to clean up. I've just started on this. I have a lot of mess. And I think one should do things that are bigger than oneself.

Mary Kay, I think you already have an anti-dementia program in place.