And Then There's This... Norma: Dry Humor
This is the Feb. 20, 2020, excerpt from “Stardust: An Alzheimer's Love Story,” my day to day accounts of caring for my wife Norma in the advanced stages of her dementia.
I can lead Norma to water, but I can't make her drink. And I've tried all the tricks and variations — with ice and flavor drops, through a straw, holding her nose shut. It's not like the water tastes bad. We get it from our own deep well that's impervious to runoff and upstream pollution. She just won't drink the stuff.
That vexes (i e., enrages) me for two reasons. (1) it makes her taking of pills all the more difficult, and (2) it leaves her vulnerable to dehydration and all its attendant illnesses. She's almost as adamant against drinking orange juice (alone, with club soda or with tonic water), milk, tomato juice, prune, juice, wine and beer.
Today's been especially irksome. As I fumed about it earlier, she's prescribed around 20 pills a day — roughly eight, two and 10 at equally spaced intervals. She got this morning's dosage down over an agonizing 15 minutes, during which she held teeth tighter together than the stones in the Great Pyramid at Giza, admitting only sips of water that would have left a hummingbird parched. But she took them.
This evening, though, has been a disaster. Among the 10 pills she's assigned to swallow are two menacing red capsules clearly designed to dissolve in the stomach. I bring her water in a McDonald's cup with a lid and a straw, hoping it will remind her of happier days. Then I wedge one of the red capsules into her mouth and urge her to drink. Instead, she lets the capsule dissolve in her mouth and only then does she sip — and I do mean sip — from the straw. When the straw emerges from her mouth, there are red flecks all over it. I recall that her last bunch of pills — purchased during what the insurance company cozily calls the “donut hole” — set me back $500, and I feel my brain go airborne, leaving my tongue to fend for itself.
“Damn it to hell, Norma!” I froth, “how hard is it to swallow a damn pill? You're going to die or wind up in a hospital with tubes in your arms if you don't start drinking more water.” She begins to cry — just the tiniest bit, and I instantly hate myself. We aren't a dramatic couple. So even the hint of tears destroys me. Now crying myself, I rush to explain that it would kill me to lose her, that she holds my life in place.
I hug her and apologize over and over. When her face relaxes, I assume my mustache-twirling voice and hiss, “Or am I just tricking you? Is it possible that I've been poisoning you all along in the hope of getting our story on 'Dateline'? What? You say your water tastes like anti-freeze? It's hard to understand you the way you're clawing at your throat.”
And corny as my routine is, it gets her laughing, and I've never felt happier. We leave the rest of the pills lying on the table. Maybe later. Maybe not at all. But I never want to make her cry again.
Your comments and questions welcomed at stormcoast@mindspring.com.
