Patience

I sit patiently beside my Father in the busy waiting room of his Doctor’s office. He waits quietly beside me, but occasionally I hear him giggle a little as he stares into the distance. When I try to start a conversation he only answers me with a simple sentence and does not add anything to the conversation. I have told the receptionist that I want to go in with my Father during his checkup so I can let the Doctor know what is going on with him. We watch people come and go in the waiting room for an hour. The young father rocking his sick little girl while he waits for a prescription, a businesswoman checking her watch often and a distraught older lady who can’t find her health card. After an hour, we are finally called into the Doctor’s office. 

The Doctor says ‘How are you Bill? ‘Fine.’ ‘How is your memory Bill?’  ‘Oh, pretty good.’ ‘No more memory loss Bill?’ ‘No, it’s all good.’ I have to interject at this point, and say to the Doctor ‘He isn’t fine. He is having a lot of short-term memory loss.  Forgetting who called on the phone, not knowing the days of the week, forgetting appointments.’ Dr. Venturi asks several more questions about my Dad’s general health, about blood pressure, sleeping habits and his sore knee, making notes of the answers on his computer. I am reading as much of these notes over his shoulder as I can. 

‘Do you drink Bill?’ ‘Not too much.’ ‘How often do you have a drink?’ ‘Oh, occasionally I have a drink at the Legion,’ says my Dad.  Again I have to interrupt. ‘Dad, that’s not true, you have to tell your Doctor the truth.’ ‘Dr. Venturi, he drinks a lot. Everyday.’ And the Doctor asks him ’How much do you drink? One, two drinks?’ My Dad answers ‘One, two, sometimes three.’ ‘Three what? Glasses or pints?’ And my Father answers ‘Pitchers.’ There is a moment of silence after that. 

I ask ‘How many drinks can he have if he is driving himself to and from the Legion?’ Dr. Venturi says ‘You’re driving? Not even one. If you get caught, you will get your license taken away and you will never get it back. You need to take a taxi.  Every time. Every day.’  Finally, someone else is agreeing with me about that! The Doctor looks at my Dad and says ‘No driving yourself to the Legion.  Get a ride or call a cab. I can take your license away. I won’t right now, but I will if you keep drinking and driving.’

Dr. Venturi talks to us as the printer spits out a form. ‘ I am giving you a prescription for a pill to take daily that should help with the memory loss. Try it for a month and see if things improve. Then we will have a follow up appointment and I can up the dosage if it isn’t working.’ He looks at me directly in the eyes and says ‘It should buy him some time.’ My heart stutters a bit at that comment and I break out in a cold sweat.

We leave the Doctor’s office with lab forms and I take a number for that wait, and we sit again. I think that my Father may be a little mad at me for the things I told the Doctor, but he appears to be in the same frame of mind as before and sits quietly again in the busy waiting room. I see that the distraught woman is still there, talking to another woman and telling the story of her lost Health card. There are mothers waiting with their coughing children. But my Father doesn’t appear to notice anyone, just sits still with a blank look on his face.

The blank looks have been happening for a while now. As well as the odd stories my Mother would tell my brother and I. How she didn’t think he could remember his password for his email account any longer. How he would go to the store and come home with something other than what he left to get. How he forgot the way to my house a couple of times and needed directions to get to a restaurant he had gone to for the past twenty years. He was insistent that his car was a 2015 model and that it was written down wrong as a 2011 on the car ownership. I had been asking my Mother to make an appointment for a checkup for him for at least six months, every time I talked to her. She would say ‘Oh, I’ll get around to it.’ Or ‘I’ll put that on my list of things to do.’ Finally, I had to make the call and plan to go with him. 

When his number is called, Dad goes into the lab to get his tests done. I take the opportunity to look up information on the prescribed drug on my phone.  ‘Donepezil – a drug prescribed to alleviate memory loss in patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s symptoms.’ Well, there it is in black and white. The diagnosis that the Doctor wouldn’t say directly, the diagnosis I feared, and the diagnosis that my Mother seems to be in denial about. I feel like I have been punched in the stomach. Although I already knew in my heart that this was probably what was happening, it is still shocking to finally have it confirmed. 

My mind is spinning as I think about the challenges ahead. Sometime in the near future we will have to take his license away. ‘Oh, that is not going to be a happy day! We will have to get rid of his car, or else he will just keep driving it, with or without his license.  Mom will have to hide the keys to her car all the time!’ My Mother is not going to be good in this new caregiver role.

My Dad comes out of the Lab and we are ready to leave. I say ‘Let’s stop and have some lunch before I take you home. We’ll go to the Tim Horton’s up the road from your place.’ ‘Okay’ he says. We get in the car and start to drive. ‘Where did you say you wanted to stop?’ he asks after a couple of minutes. ‘We’ll stop for lunch at Tim Horton’s.’  A couple of minutes later he asks again ‘Where did you want to stop?’ ‘Tim Horton’s, I’ll buy you some lunch.’ ‘Okay’ he says.  ‘Here? Was this where you wanted to stop for lunch?’ ‘Yes’ I answer.

As we pull into the parking lot at Tim Hortons I think that I will have to order a double/double of patience along with my BLT on a bagel.  Lots and lots of patience will be necessary for the days and months and the years ahead.