Early Signs of Dementia that I Missed

In September of 2009, I experienced the Ahha! moment when I finally recognized that mom was in the very early stages of Alzheimer’s. I immediately began to keep a log of what I observed during every visit and of every telephone call with mom so I could understand what was happening. During the first year or so I used this log to try to convince my father of mom’s early signs of dementia. He continued to deny any and all issues but my observations were clearly consistent with Alzheimer’s disease.

I was trying to predict my mother’s life and how to take care of her

The more I was reading about the disease, the more meticulous I became with logging the details of my observations. It was getting clear to me that we could truly identify stages of mom’s disease so I was desperately trying to understand how much time we had. What was the progression? How would we handle these changes in my mother? When did we need to be prepared? It was distressing trying to foresee the rest of my mother’s life and predict how to take care of her.

The interesting thing is that even prior to my Ahha! moment, I noticed certain things about her behavior but never connected it to dementia. I brushed things off as part of her aging. When I tried to discuss certain things with her, she brushed them off as choices and no big deal. It’s common for a person stricken with the very early signs of dementia to experience heightened anxiety and insecurity. Mom was anxious, no doubt, about what she noticed about herself. So for those of us observing her, subtle signs were there, including more anxiety, but recognizing them was a challenge. It was all very slow to develop which made it easier for things to go unnoticed.

Reluctance to drive one of the early signs of dementia?

One issue I called her on was her decision to stop driving entirely. My recollection is that she was becoming more and more reticent to drive as early as 2006 and seemed to avoid it if she could. I began to notice that whenever I visited and we decided to go out in the car, she enlisted me to do the driving. It seemed odd to me as she was always a very good driver. My visits were short and meant to be happy times so I never argued. Mom also seemed happy to let my father drive her where she needed to go when I wasn’t there. That drove me crazy because to me it was an independence thing and I tried to convince her that it was good to maintain her skills. What if something happened to dad?

More timid behavior could have signaled dementia

Another behavior I noticed whenever we were together is that she was becoming very clingy. We always enjoyed shopping together and a few hours at the outlet mall was a nice mother/daughter outing. We laughed about everything and did crazy things together. But I remember I started to get frustrated with my mother when she started clinging to me and not moving about independently in the stores. We took different sizes and I was looking for clothes for northern climate while she was looking for southern climate. It made no sense that she was stuck to my side looking at the same rack of mark downs. I remember telling mom to go shop.

It even annoyed me when she wouldn’t just go to the ladies restroom by herself. Instead of saying I’ll be right back I’m going to the restroom, my mother would wait until I would go with her. She would ask me to drop everything to take her to the restroom. I remember she covered her tracks by saying that she had occasionally seen creepy people in that area and didn’t want to go by herself. Perhaps that was a reasonable explanation at the time and a great way to cover her insecurities.

I missed the clues at a time when she needed more love

That’s what all this was. My mother became very insecure being alone. With the benefit of hindsight, I suppose she was afraid of getting lost in a place she had been a hundred times. I wasn’t as nice as I should have been at this point because I didn’t see my mother as old or infirm. She was still vibrant in attitude and physically young in my eyes. But we began to have these little skirmishes that added tension to our relationship. I had no idea at that time what was happening to her. It didn’t occur to me that I should examine these changes. When I look back on how I acted, I wish I had been more compassionate and loving. I believe that she fully understood what was happening to herself but dad and I missed her very early signs of dementia.