They're Coming To Take Me Away, Ha Ha!

This morning I had to drive into the city to meet up with two of my co-workers and then we drove together into downtown to turn in a bid for a project that our company was competing for. After an hour of tumultuous driving conditions caused by the traffic nightmare that erupted this morning when they closed the 10th/14th Street exit for the next 16 months… (Yes folks, count ‘em- SIXTEEN months!!) I never thought I was going to make it, but I did. After I finally arrived, we pile into one work truck and head for downtown. When we located the building where the bid opening would be held, we cruised around and found us a nice flat parking lot across the street and then spent the next two and half hours dodging Atlanta’s finest- the homeless vagrants, beggars and street walkers that must spend each day harassing the parking patrons for money, cigarettes, etc. They would come up to the truck or right up to you face-to-face… it is a scene that gets really old, really fast for me. Anyhoo, right before the bid time we finally finished putting our packets together with the final numbers and ran like no tomorrow to turn the bid package in… across the lot, across the street, down the sidewalk, into the government building, through security, the whole nine yards… and believe it or not, we WON!!! Yes, for the first time in over a year our company was low bidder on a project- WOOHOO! After lunch, I cruised the long trip to LaGrange to take my grandmother to the doctor… what a freakin’ nightmare…. Her appointment was at 2:15 and we got there at 2:15 on the dot. And then we waited for over an hour and a half to be called back only to be rushed through the appointment procedure. I went in and told the doctor that the second prescription for memory loss was not helping her ongoing decent into mindlessness and instead of taking her off the meds, he asked that we add another prescription on to the other two! Now he wants her to take THREE high-dollar brain meds at one time! Now I am really upset… to be perfectly honest I do not believe ANY of them work! Her condition seems to only worsen with each passing day… hell, I am the one who talks to her 2+ times a day and endures the painstaking conversations with her… the long cell phone calls where 75% of the calls are spent waiting for her to remember what she wanted to tell me! Do you know how hard it is to figure out what someone else wants to tell you?? Well I do! I do it EVERY day! Day in and day out… and it drives me INSANE!!!!!!!!!!! It breaks my heart to hear her struggle with simple words or phrases. I try so hard not to correct her or fill in her blanks too much… I feel absolutely awful after every phone call. Every conversation ends with her trying to remember what she wanted to tell me and with a promise that I will call her that afternoon or the next morning. I have been religiously calling her every morning and every evening for TWO WHOLE YEARS and she still asks me if I am going to call her again… I honestly believe in my heart of hearts that once you reached a certain point as a victim of dementia, there is no “slowing down” of the progression. And that is all these pills supposedly do… is “slow down the progression”… there is no cure or fix… it is a dead end situation and it SUCKS. And to top off this great trip to the doctor today, my grandmother told me this really great story about her sunglasses that she brought along with her… how she bought them at the store and has worn them for a while now but the arms just don’t fit her too well any more… and I am starting at them in her hands and thinking about the day I bought those for myself in Florida on a beach trip for “girls weekend” a couple of years ago… I let her wear them a few months back and now she thinks they are hers… I think I am going out of my mind. Period.