This tree was in a neighborhood in Portland, southwest of downtown.
Arthur spent about 5 hours receiving a “cognitive evaluation” with some psychological specialists at the VA. I had a pretty boring time just waiting around for the whole thing to finish, so I walked around outside.
[daily log: walking, 5.5km;]
This tree is in front of Arthur’s infamous yurt, his bedroom-away-from-home since times immemorial (about 20 years).
Before the yurt, he had an ancient school bus converted to an RV, parked in a similar location in Juli and Keith’s yard. So Arthur calls the yurt “the bus.” Keith worries about Arthur being in the yurt, but I think he’s better off there than in some location (e.g. the guest room here) which is less familiar to him. Since he himself built the yurt, it’s quite to his liking and very familiar.
Art and I did another appointment at the VA hospital and clinics this morning. This time, he got an echocardiogram. The tech was very chatty and explained to me what he was doing and seeing as he did it, which made it pretty interesting for me. Art’s arhythmias were quite noticeable.
[daily log: walking, 5km;]
This tree was along the road just up above Juli and Keith’s. Apparently, it is Autumn.
I took Art to the VA hospital and clinics in downtown Portland, today. We saw doctor Kim, who is a very personable doctor and who is one of the few doctors I’ve interacted with, with Arthur, who seems to “get” Art’s mental style. It was a bit intense, as Dr Kim used the word “dementia” with Arthur directly for the first time. I really haven’t ever dared to use that word – Art has always been of the clear and firm opinion that that is something that happens to other people, not to him. So I guess I was relieved to let Dr Kim bring it up, in a medical setting. It could be between him and a doctor, and I wasn’t implicated except as a witness.
Next step is the comprehensive cognitive function evaluation, scheduled for next week.
[daily log: walking, 4km;]
ㅁ The stories accumulate like snow, forming drifts among the neurons. The underlying spaces become blurred and smoothed out. The stories remain. You can study their patterns and find self.
– a nonnet.
This tree is in Juli and Keith’s yard in western Oregon, where I’m visiting. The Fall weather is milder here than in Southeast Alaska.
I went to town to do shopping errands today. Into the giant Fred Meyer store (like a Walmart or Target, for those unfamiliar with Pacific Northwest). After all the time living and working in a tiny town on a Southeast Alaskan island, it’s a bit overwhelming, but not in a bad way, at least for me. You have the thought: this store feels bigger than the whole town!
There was an amusing incident. Arthur insisted on coming along on the shopping trip. He’s been quite anxious, since leaving home, about his lack of a certain brand of chocolate that we’ve been planning to “refresh his supply” on this trip. It’s a kind of separation anxiety, almost. We had run out of his brand back in August or so (we keep a lot on hand, and refresh once a year shopping down south, or order online), and we’d been unable to re-order online: vendors were “out of stock.” It was a distressing situation for him.
So he wanted to come along, so we could stop at the big stores and look for his brand of chocolate. We found it at Fred Meyer, and we bought 24 “giant size” bars of chocolate – maybe (only maybe) good for a year back up in Alaska. But it was all they had in stock.
The thing that was so striking: the moment we put the chocolate bars in the shopping cart, Arthur’s anxiety melted away. You could see him visibly relax. And then he announced he was tired, and he went and sat down at the front of the store to wait for me to finish the rest of my shopping.
So I got to spend a few hours with Arthur in a less anxious state. Of course, within a few hours, he’d found himself a new thing to worry about: flashlights! He wanted to make sure all the flashlights worked, that he could find in his yurt (his room-away-from-home at Juli’s, since time immemorial).
[daily log: walking, 3km;]
This tree is dailier than others, along the road to town.
Art had a difficult night last night. He has a thing that happens sometimes, where he wakes up disoriented – much more than usual. He needs to get up to go to the toilet but he can’t find his way from the bed to the bathroom. He crashes into things. Of course it doesn’t help that he is stubborn, in persisting in the belief that he can navigate in the dark. It’s impossible to get him to adopt a habit of turning on a light to find the bathroom – he believes with his heart and soul that his excellent spatial memory can get him from on place to another in a familiar environment, in the dark. Leaving a light on is useless – he’ll grumpily turn it off the moment I go to bed. He insists on sleeping in absolute dark – to the point of closing the blinds against the moonlight.
Anyway, his excellent spatial memory is long gone. He wakes up disoriented, can’t find the door out of the bedroom, stumbles around. I awoke to a loud crash at around 11:30 PM, and went down stairs. I found him lying on the floor. There was urine all over the floor near the door. He seemed to have head-butted the wall where a small heater unit is installed, damaging the wall and the unit such that repairs will be recovered. I don’t even know how he did that.
It took us more than an hour to get him back into the bed. In his disoriented state, he couldn’t figure out how to stand up. He’s week, and with shaky balance, but when his mental faculties are more normal, he’s able to get himself up off the ground or floor. But last night it was a struggle. I kept trying to explain to him what he needed to do: “Roll sideways, get a knee under you, lever yourself up by grabbing the edge of the bed.” These instructions just made him sullen, as if I was giving impossible advice. And I’m not strong enough to lift him. So we had to wait out the lack of ability – in the end we got him close enough to the bed that I was able to kind of lever him up onto the bed, against much protestations of suffering and agony (he had bad arthritis in the shoulders).
I got the floor cleaned up. I disabled the damaged heater so it won’t be a hazard, pending repair, and later I gifted him a portable one that I have been using to heat the RV, to control mold.
In the morning, he asked me what had happened to the heater – he apparently didn’t remember anything that happened. It’s unrealistic to expect him to be grateful for the help I give him, when he can’t remember needing my help.
It was a hard night.
[daily log: walking, 4km; retailing, 3hr]
This tree expected the sun to set, in an anthropomorphized manner.
I had a very stressful day.
This was due to a conversation with Arthur, this morning, at airport after seeing his brother Alan off. We had driven into town for the early flight at Klawock Airport, and I’m sure that in Arthur’s reasoning, it would have been helpful for him to drop me and for him to come get me from work later – saving me a trip out to the house to drop him off and come back. He was just trying to be helpful, at first, and forgetting (as he so often does) his disabilities, or the years elapsed since their onset.
Arthur: I can drive. I’ll drop you at your work in town and come back later to pick you up.
Me: You haven’t driven in 4 years. I’m not really comfortable with you driving.
Arthur: I can drive fine.
Me: I told you before, you’re free to drive, but I don’t want to ride with you. I don’t feel safe.
Arthur: (blank look)
Me: Four years ago, when we were driving to town, we had an incident where basically you seemed you forgot you were driving. You were trying to multitask, digging around in your pocket, and we went into a ditch slightly. I got scared. I told you I didn’t want to ride with you when you were driving after that.
Arthur: I don’t remember that happening.
Me: I’ve told you about it many times since then, but yes, you’ve forgotten. That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
Arthur: (a confrontational look, right at me) I think you’re making that up.
Me: Why would I make that up? What reason?
Arthur: (Angrily) I don’t know!
Anyway, I think with all the guests we’ve had over the past several weeks, this broader social context has “stirred Arthur up,” in the sense that he’s suddenly feeling more constrained by his lifestyle than his usual pattern of disregard and lethargy. I also think with my recent increased responsibilities at the store (and his financial loan) has got him feeling more “entitled” at some level to concessions on my part. In principal, this makes sense.
I understand where this is coming from, but frankly it terrifies me. Although this is maybe the third time he’s directly accused me of making up a memory of something that happened as a way to thwart what he expects to happen, this is the first time it’s been about such a serious subject – the previous times were about whether we’d watched a certain TV show episode before, or bought something or not at the store. I’m not sure how to handle this. Especially in the context of the other stuff happening right now.
Later, after I cooled off some, I tried to talk about it more. But he then he kept wanting to change the subject. He did say at one point “I want more access to the car.”
I reiterated what I’d told him before: “I won’t tie you down and prevent you from driving, but I won’t ride with you. And with what’s happening with the store, I realize you have less access to the car than usual.”
So now I’m thinking – maybe I need to buy a car. Just so he has the car sitting there in the driveway, to assuage his sense of abstract liberty – I suspect strongly that he won’t actually use it. That would be the same as with the boat: I’ve told him many times that he’s free to go out on his own in his boat, too – how can I prohibit that? I only reiterate that I think it’s not safe. And he’s never done. Perhaps he’d do the same with the car, sitting in the driveway?
[daily log: walking, 4km; retailing, 9hr]
This tree was behind a purple-leaved blueberry bush.
Because of his memory issues, sometimes I’ll end up having to have the same exact conversation with Arthur 3 or 4 times in a day. And he gets offended if I point out that it isn’t the first time we’ve had a given conversation – but somehow I can’t resist pointing it out, as it gets emotionally exhausting reviewing where the spare chargers for his ipods are for the 4th time, while he seems anxiously puzzled that he didn’t know where they were (or that he has them at all), though he’d placed them there himself.
[daily log: walking, 4km; dogwalking, 3km]
