Shut up mum!

My mother phoned me up three times this morning within a ten minute period. Each call was identical in substance. She wanted to know when her niece was due to arrive today (it is in fact tomorrow she is expected, a fact clearly written in her diary), when I was due to arrive today (once again I had written the time clearly in her diary) and finally when my brother was due to visit. He is not actually due to come down for some time, though has just returned to his home in Canterbury from his gite in France, and it is this fact which is recorded in her diary.


On each occasion I put her right and referred her to her diary, which she duly consulted and confirmed that everything was indeed written there. When I did arrive I had to go through the same dance yet again. On the twenty minute journey to the doctor's for her to have a blood test, she must have asked me where we were going and why at least seven times. But when perhaps after the fifth time of asking I allowed a little hiss of exasperation to escape my lips she spotted it in an instant and, eyes brimming with tears, pleaded with me to "make some excuses for me as I'm just an old woman with a bad memory."


It never ceases to amaze me how some things are preserved perfectly in the functioning of the brain even when the memory is almost completely destroyed. The sense of pain, for instance, remains undiminished to one's dying day (rather cruel of God that, don't you think?). Then, as we have seen above, a person's social sensibility also remains preserved when, seemingly, all around lies in ruins.


The moral would seem to be (and I say this to myself as much as to anyone else): be gentle with the elderly Alzheimer's patient. They know when you're annoyed, even faintly miffed, and they will as upset about it as you'd be if you picked up the same thing in a friend, colleague or lover. They can irritate you, they can hurt your feelings, they can appear to be as selfish as a two-year old on a bad day. But it's not their fault!