Dignifying Dementia Read Online Free PDF Page A

didn’t. They traveled with us.

    Even in the south of France, Jim found English books. During UCD’s winter semester break we headed to Nice, because we enjoyed the food, the open markets, the sunshine and the walk along the Promenade des Anglais , where we admired the elegant, mink-clad women walking their equally fashionable, adored, adoring and adorable dogs.
    One winter, though, our travel agent in Ireland said that the studio apartment we had previously rented in Nice was unavailable. I was disappointed. “What if we go to Hilton Head, South Carolina instead? It’s off-season,” I said. “We would be paying for the trip in Irish punts, and with the rate of exchange in our favor, we could afford to go. And the water pressure would be a refreshing change.” Hilton Head came to mind because we had spent a pleasant week’s vacation there some years earlier and had returned for a conference, where serendipitously an editor bought the rights to ShowTime! , which was added to their academic series. The magic seemed to be non-stop.
    Jim concurred. So that year over the winter holiday, we flew to Hilton Head. We walked along the beach and biked the trails. What do non-golfers do on rainy days? Look at real estate, of course. I asked Jim what he thought about buying a condo in Hilton Head. “If we owned a place, we could come to Hilton Head in the winter instead of worrying about whether we could get a studio in the south of France.” We were renting in Ireland and no longer owned property, so I used his old line on him: “We would have a tax break.” We bought a condo.
    Shortly after returning to Ireland and to my classes at UCD, we received a phone call from my mother’s live-in aide. Mom had been taken to the hospital diagnosed with a stroke; the physicians found breast cancer, too. We stayed in touch with her doctor and decided to fly back to New York to be with her. From there we returned to Hilton Head, found a nursing home and hired an air ambulance to fly her south. She died two weeks later. My profoundly demented dad was unaware of my mother’s death. He died two years later – four months after Jim’s initial diagnosis of dementia in June.
    Earlier that year, as we had been walking along the strand in Bray, Jim had said, “It’s time to go home.” Did Jim have intimations of his own illness? How long after a neurodegenerative disease begins to wreak havoc before symptoms appear?
    Leaving Ireland was bittersweet. Besides having fallen in love with the country, I was thriving on the lecturing, writing, speaking and consulting. Leaving brought it all to a sudden and dramatic halt.

    We were living in our condo in Hilton Head when Jim developed rectal bleeding. It was in South Carolina that the emergency room doctor said Jim had ‘dementia’ and walked away. Jim was admitted to the hospital, where a gastroenterologist treated him. An endoscopy revealed that Jim had a bleeding duodenal ulcer, which was repaired. After the procedure, the surgeon said to me, “Be sure Jim is never treated with Versed again.” Versed is often used in surgery because it causes drowsiness, reduces anxiety and prevents memory of the event. The doctor said, “Instead of sedating him, the drug made him combative.” Jim stayed overnight in the hospital – a night apart.
    I went home and slept poorly, concerned not only about Jim’s procedure but also about the offhand (but sadly accurate) remark about Jim’s having dementia. I saw the image of my father in the nursing home – twisted, sightless and voiceless.
    No, this could not be happening to my husband, too. Again, I asked myself, “What made the doctor say that?” He didn’t know Jim. I calmed myself by repeating a phrase my statistics professor had used in grad school. This doctor was definitely “generalizing beyond his data.”
    Jim had never been the detail