I'm actually getting my garden and yard work done on schedule for a lush summer backyard. The birds even seem happier now that I have some mulch down and the cat screamed "OUT!" at me this morning.
With the Memorial Day weekend, my mom and I went to the Butcher and picked up some meats that we could cook on the grill. I was hungry when I went shopping, which I know is not a good idea when trying to keep weight down. So, I saw the beautiful hamburg patties and bought a package, even though I knew they were much higher in fat than the boneless chicken breast. My mom was psyched because she hasn't had a burger in ages.
Mom woke up regular time yesterday with a great blood glucose reading, 105. She had her usual oatmeal with 3-4 drops of fenugreek and a cup of coffee and cream with 2 drops. Her morning was awesome. We had a nice clear conversation and I told her that after lunch we would go to cash in her lottery scratch ticket winnings from the tickets my brother Marty gave her for Mother's Day.
GREAT! So I thought.
I fired up the grill and put on burgers that I'd make into cheeseburgers. mmmmm. I hadn't had a burger in so long that smelling it cook was better than actually eating it. I made my mom a cheeseburger and she was thrilled.
Not so fast Josie....
About 30 minutes after lunch I told my mom that we'd head out to the store to cash in her tickets. She started to whisper to me about "the lady" in the corner. I was like, "Huh? Cut that out Ma. Stop joking. It's not night time, you shouldn't be hallucinating."
Next she started to tell me that someone "stole" her tickets off her desk. I had just seen them there before lunch so I had no idea where she may have put them for safe keeping.
Instead of arguing with her about where she put the tickets, I began to help her search for them. I said out loud, "If I were Ma, where would I hide something." She's a tucker, always tucking something into any empty spot on a shelf or book or draw. When you have a bunch of spots with stuff tucked, the search turns into a search for a needle in a haystack.
Yesterday was no different. We looked high and low. I even left her for awhile looking for the tickets while I went to the fabric store with Rachel. While we were gone, she found the tickets. Yay!
Well, their recovery was short lived. Within 15 minutes, we were heading out the door and I asked my mom, "so, where are those lottery tickets." "uhhhh, I don't know, someone stole them."
WHAT?!
Again we begin to search for the lost winning tickets. I found all the loser tickets and asked her why she isn't throwing them away. Her answer, "they could be winners." I checked them again, for about the 10th time and assured her that they were losers. Nope. In her mind she believed they could magically turn into winners. I'd love to see that, it sounds like a nice trick.
Once again, we found the tickets. This time I made her put them into a special zipper section of her purse.
In her weird backdoor logic sort of way she said, "Well, I'm only cashing in one ticket at a time." I couldn't understand why and I knew there was no way I was looking for those damn tickets again so I insisted that she cash in every winning ticket so that she doesn't need to worry about losing them again.
Super... off to the store we go with the tickets in hand.
I needed a few things at the supermarket so I had my mom go to the service desk to cash in her winning tickets. One at a time she handed the girl behind the desk a ticket. Each one is a loser from her "loser pile of tickets!"
I asked her where her winning ones were and I noticed them in her front zipper part of her purse. I tried to tell her about them being there but she waved me off.
Ok... you are on your own with those damn tickets. (Thanks Marty!)
While Josie was busy with her tickets I went to pick up a few things that we needed for dinner. I told her that I'd meet her in the front of the store. When I was going through the check out I saw her still standing in the same place talking to the girl. I looked away for 1 minutes and SHE WAS GONE!
Oh NO! Now I need to go in search of not only the tickets but MY MOTHER! If I had a dollar for every time I had to look for my mother in a supermarket, I'd be wealthy. I suppose the added benefit of searching for her in a supermarket is I get a little extra walking exercise.
I left my cart with my paid purchases in the shopping cart at the front of the store while I walked up and down the aisles in search of Josie. Eventually I found her, tucked behind a huge display of cereal boxes, with her purse open and her LOTTERY TICKETS still in her hands.
Confused, I asked her why she didn't cash them in? She said, "The girl told me that they were all losers." I knew they weren't all losers. I took the stack from her and saw the winners. I had her stand at my shopping cart in front of the store while I took the tickets to cash them in for her.
I went to a different girl. I got my mom her $110 in cash. The lottery tickets were gone. Yay! I won't spend another day searching for those darn tickets.
This was totally unusual, to have my mom behaving demented with normal blood sugar. Then it occurred to me... THE CHEESEBURGER... THE FAT IN THE CHEESEBURGER.
I remember watching the Alzheimer's Project and they described Amyloid-beta and how plaque gets around the neurons in the brain of elderly people with dementia/alzheimers which keeps prevents a synapse from occurring between ganglions or something like that.
Here's the Wikipedia entry for an Amyloid-beta:
Amyloid beta (Aβ or Abeta) is a peptide of 39–43 amino acids that appear to be the main constituent of amyloid plaques in the brains of Alzheimer's disease patients. Similar plaques appear in some variants of Lewy body dementia and in inclusion body myositis, a muscle disease.
This morning I am convinced that high fat intake is NOT GOOD for anyone, especially old people with dementia or Alzheimer's. The fat totally screws with their thought process and in my mom's case, caused her to hallucinate in the middle of the day.
Continued from my post yesterday I have a new rule...
Rule 10: No FAT. If you have fat, you MUST have a cup of Fenugreek tea to counteract the fat absorption.
I did a google search on the words "does animal fat aggravate dementia in elderly"
What I found was not surprising news... animal fat does aggravate dementia.
Here's an abstract that I found on the subject where they used mice in the study. High-fat diet aggravates amyloid-beta and tau pathologies in the 3xTg-AD mouse model
Ok, so my mom isn't a mouse but she is a mammal and the effects on her brain from eating a fatty cheeseburger sort of substantiates the claims of this abstract.
More observations will follow about the reactions of different foods on how my mom thinks and behaves.
All I know is NO MORE CHEESEBURGERS, PLEASE!
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