Soup

Meals at the facility were nourishing and pretty flavorful. He had choices, but probably forgot what he ordered.

Sometimes I found the entire plate of food from dinner in his bedside cupboard the next day.

One day before I visited him and after some errands I went to Olive Garden for a soup and salad lunch.

And then I had an AHA! moment. I ordered a bowl of soup to go--one of his favorites.

He cleaned his plate--the breadsticks that went with it, too.

After that most visits I would stop at Olive Garden and get him a bowl of soup.

Memory

The short term memory is sometimes seriously impacted by dementia--all kinds of dementias. (Don't worry if you go into another room and forget why when you get there--that's not necessarily dementia.)

Long term memories, however, stay with a person. Let them talk about what happened years ago, listen and agree. It will be good for them.

Here's a strange memory thing that happened with Ranney. While he was at the first Nursing Home (oh, more about that later.) there was a piano in the chapel. Now, apparently Ranney had taken piano lessons for a while as a child. Didn't we all? He had never played during our nearly 49 year marriage--even when we had a piano in the house.

Lupe and Tino visited him one day and he played the piano for them. Not a virtuoso, but not just chopsticks either. Did that long term memory bring that back? Strange, right?

About that first Nursing Home. This was where he went after being released from the hospital. At the door to exit you must enter a code. The code was pretty short and is posted at the door so that visitors can get out. Too simple, as my smart husband just entered the code and left for a walk one evening early on. They call in an "elopement." It became necessary for him to move to a facility with tighter security.

The flowers on the quilt

Here is the story of the flowers on the quilt. This happened early on, and I thought, well that's odd, but didn't bring it up at any doctor appointments or anything. Perhaps if I had...

We were sitting on the bed and Ranney says: "Those flowers are fighting."

"They are?"

"Yes. Those over there are okay, but these are fighting."

We went back and forth about it for a few minutes and then I change the quilt. I don't believe we used that quilt again while he was at home.

One thing that happens with Lewy Bodies is visual hallucinations. This would be a form of that. I put it together later that it was.

Nursing Home

It's tough to have to live in a nursing home, even one that is nice and well fitted for your needs.

Ranney told me one day, "This place is okay. I don't mind living here."

Sigh of relief.

Until a day or two later when I read in his journal: "Kathy just doesn't understand sarcasm."

I am back to tell some of the stories.

Ranney passed away last June 16, 2016 at approximately 6:15 a.m. The nursing home had given us a room to ourselves. Rachel came the previous day from Boise. Friends came and sat with me until she got there. She had been there with the family the weekend before, and Karen and the whole crew a week or so before that. Chris had come the previous day, and Monsignor Ecker came and anointed him. We knew it was coming.

It was my birthday.

Rachel and I had been keeping vigil. Taking turns resting on the other bed in the room. She woke me early and told me she thought the end was coming. I held his hand. Suddenly, he opened his eyes, looked at me, then squeezed my hand, and he was gone.

In the wake of Robin Williams wife talking about his Lewy Bodies, friends have asked about the symptoms. I have decided to rewaken this blog and tell the stories. Some of them are terribly sad, some are scary, and some are downright funny.

They might give some wake up calls to some of the readers--to see things earlier than I did.

Memory Loss

Oh, please, Lord God. May the things that he DOES remember not be the times I was cross with him.

 

Amen

Money

.

For a while he had an obsession with coins. He had had a bunch of coins for a long time and then started counting them over and over and finally putting them into coin rolls. He cashed those in and is less concerned with them as he was






Instead it is a great sum of money that he "has" but the bank personnel are not allowed to tell me about it. He says I should use it to pay off ALL the bills, even the mortgage. I don't suppose it occurs to him that if I can't know about it I can't very well use it to pay those bills.




We had to be into the bank for some business the other day and when we were finished he got a withdrawal slip to take some money out of his small savings account. He made it out for $4000. The account was currently at $160 so he only took out $150 which he then gave to me. He was content with that. But still insists that he has $200,000 in some secret account. (Sometimes it is $6000 and other times it is $180,000 or at least will be in December.)




I am still not sure if that poor teller thought he was trying to rob the bank of $4000.