New Change for the New Year

It’s January 1. I don’t do New Year’s Day posts. This holiday has absolutely no significance to me. I don’t like to get drunk. I hate staying up late. It’s just another day, except that I am inconvenienced by businesses that close.

Today is an important day in my life, however, because it appears that my dad is crossing a new threshold. He had a very hard time making it from his bedroom to the kitchen table this morning.

People with dementia shuffle. Their steps get shorter and shorter. My understanding is that it’s a balance problem. They’re afraid to take long steps because the parts of their brains that control balance are being eaten up. Short steps make them feel more secure, although therapists tell them what they really need is to take long steps.

My dad started using a cane off and on a couple of years back, and then he found he had to use one all the time. I believe that happened about a year ago. This fall I took his canes away and told him he had to use his walker all the time. He had started falling much too often. When you’re in your late eighties, one fall per year is too much. He fell maybe four times in 2018. Those are the falls I know about.

The walker hasn’t turned out to be a long-lasting solution. In a very short time, it has become inadequate for his needs. Today on his way to the kitchen, he was taking steps maybe two inches long, and he cursed repeatedly. He’s not just having balance problems. He says his feet stick to the floor.

He has a compressed disk. I don’t know if that contributes to his mobility issues. Maybe it does. Regardless, I believe dementia is the primary factor, because his gait issues increase along with his cognitive problems, and besides, shuffling, like death, is a normal consequence of dementia.

He is also on stronger painkillers now, but I can’t find any information indicating that painkillers cause leg weakness or shuffling. They can affect balance adversely, but his problems go beyond balance.

I am not an expert on the process of dying, but common sense tells me that when an elderly person with heart failure loses the ability to get normal exercise, it must surely hasten the end.

We have a choice now. We can get a wheelchair and make do, or we can opt for assisted living. It seems to me that an ALF is the only way to go. Once he starts using a chair, he is going to lose what little upright mobility he still has, and then we will be looking at new jobs like putting him on the toilet and giving him showers. That’s too much. I have accepted a lot of very dirty and emotionally distressing jobs, but I draw the line at carrying a naked parent around and attending to his most intimate hygiene needs. If you and your dad live in a shack in Rio de Janeiro, you accept jobs like that. It’s not mandatory or desirable in affluent countries.

I can’t really do it anyway. Try lifting 210 pounds off a toilet some time.

Some people have a martyr complex about caring for others. They love talking about wiping people’s behinds and bathing them. They talk about how natural it is, and they claim they find it fulfilling. Not me. Disability is humiliating, and some of the work caregivers do is offensive and taxing by the standards of my particular culture. I don’t think picking a dirty diaper up from the carpet is uplifting, and frankly, I think the people who rhapsodize about such activities are as full of something as any diaper. In millennialspeak, it’s “virtue signalling.” You hear it from the same kind of people who talk about eating their placentas and the supposed beauty of women’s monthly ordeals.

I don’t find bodily functions beautiful in the slightest. If I did, I’d be excited about boogers and earwax. Somehow, the virtue signallers never talk about how beautiful those things are.

I can’t celebrate curses. It’s perverse. You can learn a lot from caring for someone, and in some ways it will bless and improve you, but on the whole, life is better when people are healthy, clean, and competent.

Speaking of blessings, I have to say that I’m not very upset by my dad’s new problem, because it means the move to an ALF is going to happen soon. Also, because the increase in his mobility problem is making him so miserable, he is suddenly more willing to consider an ALF. I don’t have to have his consent, but it would certainly help.

The one thing that bothers me about it is that it drives a point home: this is real. The man I have known for so many decades is not going to be here much longer. I am going to have to endure the process of watching a second parent die. It’s really going to happen.

Watching anything die is not easy. When I used to fish, and I heard fish flopping around inside the cooler, I always had to stifle an urge to pull them out and throw them over the side. My dad is more important than a fish.

I have had concerns about deciding what measures to take to keep him alive.

Right now, I could take away every prescription that improves his health, and his medical providers would be completely on board. I could post an ad in the local paper, saying, “I am withholding medicine so my dad will die sooner,” and law enforcement would not come after me. I can do whatever I want. It’s not a good position to be in.

All the decisions are up to me. I have decided to keep him on his prescriptions. I asked him about it, and it’s what he wants. On the other hand, I would oppose any effort to give him major surgery. It would be cruel and pointless, even if it bought him a few months.

I have had a lot of concerns. I have wondered if I was right to give him pills that might extend his suffering by keeping him alive. Now it looks like I don’t have to worry about that. They’re not helping much, if at all. He is still fading. Nothing can help him, short of divine healing.

I can go ahead and give him his pills with a clear conscience. I won’t be prolonging his suffering, and I won’t be withholding medicine, which seems Macchiavellian and possibly sinful to me.

One day they may tell me to stop feeding him. That’s not for me. I don’t think it’s always immoral to turn off a breathing machine, but starvation is inhumane. So is death by thirst. As long as a demented person’s body will function without a lot of unnatural help, I think feeding should be continued.

My best guess is that God and nature will make the hard decisions for me. He’s not Terri Schiavo, who could have lived a long time had she continued to receive care. Unlike her, he has a progressive disease which will run its course quickly. If I make mistakes, they won’t cut years off his life or add unwanted years to the continued functioning of a nearly vacant body. If they have any effect at all, it will be small.

I think God has told me my dad will go during the early part of this year. We will see.

Seems like I have two major tasks: getting him into an ALF, and doing what I can to assure his salvation. That’s not so bad. It will be easier than what I do now.