caring and culinary arts II

Between bowls and bowl games and the NCAA channeling memory loss by erasing 14 years of football victories as part of its sanctions against Penn State University football, it was worth rummaging through storage for this 25 year old poster, “The Few … The Proud … The Lions”.  Patti is a Penn State alum.

Multiple Sclerosis visually impaired, my fellow holder got laughing so hard at my improvised description of the poster in my best sportscaster affected voice that I had to use her lap to support her end of the 1987 Fiesta Bowl victory poster. 

Of course to us the preeminent bowl is the bowl I use for my continuing experiments with caring and the culinary arts. Recently we tried reverting to a more conventional self-feed meal where food bites are similar, such as chicken tenders as the main entre.

Sure enough Patti reverted immediately to what I call ‘chipmunking’ her food. She just keeps putting pieces in her mouth forgetting either to chew or swallow. Unmonitored this can quickly create a choking danger. And this is why in the care facility era she has progressed to being fed in the assisted dining room rather than allowed to try and self-feed.

Soooo all the more I wanted to try reverting back to using varying shapes, textures, tastes and color of food pieces to try and keep her mouth rebooting (for the lack of a better word) with each piece and extending her ability to self-feed just a little longer. It worked like a champ just as it had last week. Today’s bowl featured Patti’s favorite cut peaches, black grapes, cut up strawberries, raspberries, and cut up chicken breast grilled in Italian dressing. No chipmunking! No choking! I wish I understood why.

With my own attention and time increasingly consumed by living with lung cancer, my lung cancer odyssey, I’m discovering that keeping all the balls in the air is a bit more challenging when suddenly I am one of those balls … and yeah it’s just a bit harder when Patti cannot remember. 

by Patrick Leer

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Caregivingly Yours, MS Caregiver @ http://caregivinglyyours.blogspot.com/

Lung Cancer Odyssey @ http://lung-cancer-survivor.blogspot.com/

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We are … what we remember

Caregiving and Multiple Sclerosis can bump into semantic walls. Short term memory loss, cog fog, or dementia may be just words to some, but to others - them’s fightin’ words.

Yet MS symptoms can affect intellectual and social abilities. Sometimes this is easier to demonstrate as a caregiver through a thread of current events.

Patti surprised me Tuesday evening when I picked her up for an outing asking me about the Penn State scandal which I had read to her about on Monday. I try to make the time to read newspapers to her and ask her questions about the stories as an ongoing informal cognitive rehabilitation.

She never has recall over a day anymore, I was stunned. Yet before beginning a victory dance I realized that Patti is a Penn State alum and both long term and short term memory must be coming together in some kind of cognitive cauldron here.

Additionally ‘we’ had attended several football games together at Penn State's Beaver Stadium in the distant past. I am a U of Maryland alum and our respective universities had a football rivalry.

As a visitor I had always found Penn State a world unto itself. When 100,000+ people begin shouting in sync their signature shout and response cheer “We are … Penn State” it’s eerie.

Intuitively, now in 2011, I experimented with talk radio while driving. Needless to say the topic was the Penn State scandal.

Patti was so involved with the program I was captivated. Not only was she following it but remembering previous callers and periodically verbalizing her own two bits. Most impressive to me was her focus on the victims not the fall out. It was frustrating to see flashes of the person that was, yet discover she could not tell me what she had just had for dinner or where we were going.

Could this cauldron of long and short term memories keep breaking through? Picking her up after a 48 hr gap, Patti remembered nothing about it. It was all new to her.

We are … what we remember.

Caregivingly Yours, Patrick Leer 

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