Springing forward

Maybe.
"Spring" as a concept is almost here in Sapporo.
Sometimes. Maybe.
There are days of warm sunshine, when crocus flowers crowd the gardens and park. We walk around smiling.
Then there are days of ear-burning temperatures, swirling snow flakes. Hunched shoulders and grimaces.

Okaasan is alternatively out and about vs snuggled in the heated table asleep.
Her solo walking is getting more regular and safer. A few times coming home late and tired. A few times with no telephone/GPS. No falls.
Dear Son has been home more as the ski season sputters on - so Okaasan has had more conversation and family mealtimes. She even washed up the dinner dishes twice - but the fact that I remember that and recall it here shows you how irregular that action is.

We notice little things about Okaasan and her life-view that tell us her brain cells are drifting away, although day to day she is a happy old lady - giggly and smiley.

* VERY giggly and smiley if she can get alcohol! We have just finished the small bottle of sake that we've been giving her tiny amounts of at dinner time recently. We pour a little in a cup and then hide the bottle quickly.
On the last night I gave Okaasan the bottle and cup so she could look at the label and pour for herself. She put the bottle to her lips, threw back her head - and downed the remaining sake in one! Guy style!
No Japanese ladies of her generation - and probably many generations after too - would ever do something as uncouth as that :-) It's a childlike untrammeled joy in something tasting good. Very uncharacteristic of a polite, elderly lady.
And a very good reason for hiding bottles of alcohol.
I think the day is a-coming when DS and I won't be able to have glasses/cans of alcohol on the dinner table - because if we have it and Okaasan spies it - she wants it, and more, and more...

* Another evening we gave her the box of heated rice and her rice bowl to serve herself. However, there was a tea cup in front of her too - and I watched Okaasan carefully move the steaming rice with her chopsticks - from the box into the tea cup.

Giggles all round.

* Missing stories:

Sad proof that one of Okaasan's old stories has gone - temporarily or for ever.

I have a new student who is born in Japan, but introduces himself as Korean. I was talking about that with Okaasan. How many such people have "yagi" as part of their Japanese family name etc.
I waited for her once-familiar story to appear: My friend at school was called Tamako Yagi, but the day the war ended, she never came back to school - maybe she was Korean and her family went back? 
I've heard that story a million times. Three/four years ago.
Now I told my story a few times, she told me that "Yagi" is a common name used by Korean families in Japan etc. But her school friend's story didn't emerge.
THEN I told her story as if it were my own.
One of my students wartime had a school friend named Tamako Yagi, but the day war ended she didn't come back to school...
Nothing.
Okaasan just made "really? Yagi is a name used by Koreans in Japan" replies. 
Her own story, once an endless part of her repertoire, just gone?

As a reader of this blog commented once: the annoying, repeated stories become almost like friends - when they have apparently gone, you kind of miss them.

The Oliver James book Contented Dementia recommends identifying A Primary Theme - a story/experience that the "client" holds special, that as the dementia progresses you can use to enter their world by key words/gestures - when speech is disappearing.

I made a list of Okaasan's favorite stories when I read the book - four years ago?

1. Korean food is best - New York and the JTB guide - Ikebukuro restaurant.
2. Tamako Yagi and school.
3. Father bought crab home and I waited up for him.
4. Father drank sake and gave me drinking snacks.
5. Our house had a telephone and neighbors came to use it.
6. War started and there were no lessons, I made army underwear and picked vegetables. No food.
7. I played with my brothers by the river.
8.The US didn't bomb Kawagoe because of its history.

Now? 1 and 2 seem to have gone. We don't hear those stories now. Even if we prompt with the key words. The others are maybe there - 6 and 8 particularly.
And so it goes....

MY life - and kind DS too - was rather than over my the cat crisis of a close friend. One of her indoor cats vanished for 9 days. As she had just come out of hospital after knee replacement, we headed the search for her - with a poster and flyer blitz of the neighborhood. Police and vets and every possible way we could think. Rushing away with a cat trap in the middle of dinner when a possible sighting was reported etc
On the 9th day - my friend found cat poop and hairs in her English classroom........
A few hours later she had caught her kitty and he is fine. We are all amazed.

And.

Plans for the screening of Mainichi ga Alzheimer/Everyday is Alzheimer, the documentary films by Yuka Sekiguchi - plans are in motion. Just about to get the event flyer printed...6 weeks now to the event, time to crank up the promotion and gather a screening day team for May 23.

More on that later.

I see sunshine and blue sky...it may be spring...I should go check. :-)

Downtown Okaasan

Life is getting better for Okaasan - freedom to get out and about.

Saturday I took her downtown in the car. Released her in the city center in a familiar place. Let her roam free. Checked on her a few hours later and found she'd already safely made her way home by subway. Successful outing.

Getting her ready was the usual run-around-of-confusion...

Couldn't find her purse at all. Hunted for about 30 minutes among piles of clothes, multiple bags, newspapers and stuff. Couldn't locate it.
Finally I gave her shopping money in a different little plastic pouch. But - of course - she wasn't able to remember from minute to minute that today her money was IN this pouch...so lots of confusion.

On the drive downtown I stopped at the bank to use the ATM.
"Shall I walk from here?".
Stopped at a convenience store to buy something and get change.
"Why am I here? Shall I walk from here? Do I have any money? What did I buy here? Shall I walk from here?"
Endless...endless little checking questions. It makes me realize that increasingly Okaasan needs reassurance about the immediate world around her and what her place is in it.

At home too...the little questions we notice more and more....
"Is this tomorrow's rice?"
"Why?"
"Because we are going to eat ramen? That is the ramen bowl?"
....it was actually a ramen bowl, but being used to mix salad in on the table.....

...oh...and the Japanese tea....expensive Japanese tea that we can only buy in one shop in Sapporo. 
Okaasan is having a harder and harder time making the tea for herself. Almost every day now there are cups of water/cups of tea powder/cold water/forgotten tea around the kitchen.
She probably drinks only 50% of the tea we buy for her. The rest is wasted and thrown away.

The correct tea making order: heat water/put powder in cup/wait/put hot water on powder/whisk with bamboo whisk/wait/drink - all of that is getting more and more confusing for Okaasan.
It's a basic series of actions she has seen/done all her life. Now, getting it done in the correct order is getting harder.

But!
Spring is a-coming and today will be the last day helper visit day for this winter season (must leave note about the missing/substitute purse). From now on we hope Okaasan can go out and walk on her own. Have freeeeeeedom. And get more mentally alert.

SPRING!!!!

Gadgets to make life...confusing.

Can't say when it was - but we kind of realised this summer???that Okaasan's hair always looked unwashed. Even the day she'd had a bath.

She only brushes her hair when she is going out. Usually round the house she has matted, dirty tresses. On days when we tell her to have a bath, we give her the hair dryer and she appears to have wet hair to wrap in a towel and dry. But after drying? It's often, still dirty.

I vaguely thought she was focusing more on washing underpants or her body - and forgetting her hair. Or that she was putting water on her hair and no shampoo.
The tiring family trip to the hot spring recently gave me a slightly better idea as I watched Okaasan befuddled by the shampoo/body soap plastic bottles with their push tops and nozzle dispensers.
Her confusion wasn't just WHICH was which, after all both bottles had Japanese writing on them. But the mechanism of the bottles appeared to be the problem.

We are used to Okaasan's daily confusions around the home: the central tap with lever swings to the left/right for hot/cold water; the electric kettle that she thinks every day is a constantly-hot water pot etc She sometimes uses the microwave...but forgets that she's put stuff in it...despite the "ping" telling her it's finished.

In our bathroom we have a blue plastic bottle, which we fill with shampoo. It has a push top and a nozzle. And quite a bit of English writing on it. But it does say "Shampoo" in Japanese.

Yujiro solved the riddle a week ago. He realised Okaasan didn't know that the hand soap bottle by the bathroom sink WAS soap. Or how to use it. He showed her. She couldn't get the idea of pushing the top down and holding her hand under the dispenser.

We realised she hasn't been washing her hair lately because as far as she could see: there wasn't any shampoo in the bathroom.

What form did shampoo take years and years ago in Japan? What form of container would Okaasan expect? I asked some of my older students: they said ordinary soap. Parents washed kids' hair with the same soap as for bodies...maybe.

Okaasan has a hiar salon appointment this week - I thought maybe we could get her to buy shampoo at the salon and maybe connect with that in future. Would that work? A squeeze tube maybe?

Yujiro solved it all today: he dug out our store of hotel and magazine sample shampoo sachets. You know - the stuff we all steal from hotels and in drugstores.
Bingo! Okaasan realised the sachet was shampoo - maybe because she used to travel to hotels a lot all over the world and must have used sachets many times in the past.

Wonder what else around the home will be confusing for her?

* haven't done anything about the possible stomach polyp yet. Too busy. Talking to people to find out about which hospital to go - somewhere that they will knock me senseless before they stuff tubes down my throat.

* But other health news is good : the knee and leg muscle rehabilitation has been a success. Much stronger now after weekly rehab/physio trips (it's called rehabili in Japan!). I am back to before condition or better. Just in time, as my friend has come back with her baby from a 3 week trip to her parents' home. I can be adoring aunty again.

* and cats....major jealousy/bullying going on between Chichi and Popo. Tonight they finally sat down near eachother. The plastic collar scares Chichi and he stayed out 2 nights, while we had to close all the windows and doors to keep his injured brother in.

Oh...and...and...Obama won again!!! YEAH!!!!! Loved the BBC poll which found that around the world...only Pakistan would support a Romney win. Thank goodness Americans voted for the right guy.