Happy Birthday, Dad!

Today is Dad's 93rd birthday so he got up, took a shower and put on his dress slacks and tie.  I thought it was in honor of his special day but he said he thought it was Sunday!  Another sign that he's slipping (that and the fact that he took Mom's pills this morning - yikes!)  It has been a really good day full of cards, calls and flowers/chocolates from Gail.  I took him this morning for a pedicure and in a couple hours we'll head up to Marysville to meet up with Adie for dinner.  All in all a great day.

Mom had a visit from the memory tester that works with the UW.  18 years ago, Mom signed up to have her memory monitored and since it hadn't been done for two years, she was due.  Sheila asked her a bunch of questions which Mom completely failed.  For instance, she asked her to name as many 4 legged animals as she could and her answer was "1948."  Actually her answer for everything was either 1948 or 1958 no matter what Sheila asked.  Even I didn't know how much her memory retreival had slipped.  After 5 minutes or so, Sheila talked with me privately and said "what has happened in the past two years?"  She said she'd not seen anyone slip so rapidly and thought this was more than Parkinsons.  I'll have a chat with her case manager and then they'll send me a neurologist.  I'm looking forward to hearing what he has to say about her, and he will be someone vested in really understanding what is going on with her.  Not like her current neurologist who is almost always 30-60 minutes behind schedule and who talks with us for 15 minutes and then gets up to walk us out the door.  I'm not sure he has any real idea of what's going on with Mom.  He means well and he is the one who wrote the prescription for hospice evaluation but he certainly doesn't have the motivation to really evaluate what is going on with her.  So I look forward to the experts from the Group Health/UW memory study and I'm very grateful that I have this gift of additional help.