A Phone Call Saturday afternoon

              Saturday afternoon around 4:00 PM, I got a call from Kathy saying that Mom had resisted taking her medicine, but Tom had helped her, and “there’s just nothing like team work.”  She said Mom wanted to talk to me, so she put her o, and Mom told me what she thought about team work.

She told me that Kathy and Tom were “handling me like a piece of garbage…but there are no marks.”   She sounded really very articulate and sort of like the voice of reason as she said that she just couldn’t believe that someone would “keep you a prisoner in a household and not encourage you to contact your family.  I think it has to do with money, the house, but I don’t know.  Kathy went to church. ..I think they’re going to kill me and if I die, I’m going to look up God and tell him to tell the priests where Kathy goes to church.  They are being so brash about it, and it makes me sound like such an idiot, even if I begged them on my bended knee.” 

            Then Mom seemed intent o proving she wasn’t the kind of person who went crazy.  “I lived with a man who was kind of a nut, and I worked with criminals, and I didn’t go crazy…I want to have my brain read.” 

             I told her that she had had her brain read, and they said she had Alzheimer’s. 

             “Yes, that’s what they told everybody, but that man gave me a very good write-up.”  (

            She meant Dr. Ha of the U.C. Davis Alzheimer’s Center, probably.

              “What worries me is something I read in the newspaper about someone who was forced to play the piano, but it’s not a personality change…” 

            Then she stammered some words like “I’m not a piece of driftwood.”

            Then she asked, “When have I ever gone over and bothered the neighbors?  I wish to heaven…I don’t hate these people.  I just hate their reaction.  They’re…I’m frightened.  I can’t stand living like this.”

                Of course, from time to time I interjected something, telling her how much we all loved her and how she was frightened because of the changes in her brain, so she didn’t trust someone who had loved her and lived with her for 40 years, and she wasn’t taking her medication or eating her breakfast. 

             “I’m taking my Methanon,” she said.  “I know I have to take that.” 

            I told her that it was important to take the medicine, the way it was for David and his seizures.  Medicine didn’t always work perfectly (“My psychopharmacologist and I”), but it was important to take what the doctors prescribed.  Then she asked Kathy to show her the doctors’ prescriptions.  (I’m using the plural form of doctors because she’s gotten these prescriptions from various sources.)  At the end of the conversation, she said that maybe she should let them kill her because this was no way to live.