If It's Not One Thing, It's Another....

Well, where to start? Sorry I haven't been updating, life's been happening. Had to finish school, which I barely got out of. Grades, don't ask. This term sucked a snow leopard's ass with Cheez Whiz. I'm glad it's done. I'm back home now, and I thought things would be all roses. Not so much. Sometime in April there was a fire in my grandmother's apartment building. The fire didn't damage her apartment, but it was severe enough (along with the various building violations that the landlord failed to take care of) that every resident had to evacuate and find a place to reside while repairs are made. My mother, being a concerned daughter, took my grandmother in and is letting her stay until the apartment is habitable again. Now here is where things get less cut and dry. My grandmother has had a habit of losing things and claiming that someone stole her stuff for a few years now. Most of the blame was being placed on my mother.

My mother couldn't understand why this was happening. it took a few years to find the answer, but it looks like my grandmother is suffering what looks like Alzheimer's Disease or a related form of dimentia. The thing about Alzheimer's is that it doesn't get any better. It only gets worse. It slowly deteriorates the victim's brain, and logic and reasoning skills, among other things, begin to fade. One symptom of this disease is that the person will lose something, and will believe that someone stole it. It's nothing intentional, they truly believe someone is stealing from them. Things only get worse when a person with Alzheimer's is taken out of their comfort zone or regular environment, ie. having to move out of their house to somewhere new. Mix that with the various personality defects and emotional scarring that my grandmother has, my mother and I are having a great fucking time right now.

Here's a normal episode: My grandmother loses something, she asks me and my mother if we've seen it, we don't look after her things since we stay in the living room while she takes the bedroom, so we don't know, she begins crying and saying something along the lines of "I don't know what I did to deserve this," meaning we had something to do with her stuff being missing, she goes to the bedroom, finishes crying, finds what she lost, and everything is back to normal, with the exception of my mother and I bleeding from her aftermath. We can't hold it against her because it's the disease slowly eating away at her. What sucks even more is that we can't do anything about it, it's a degenerative disease so my grandmother's mind is just going to deteriorate. There's no happy ending to this one.

I'm trying to enjoy my summer, but with my grandmother here it's really hard to. Things are good when she doesn't lose anything, but when she does, noone's happy. It's a pretty divided house, with me partially being the arbitrator. My grandmother would like nothing more than to move back to her comfort zone, and my mother and I would love that too, but until all the repairs are made to her building (people are speculating completion sometime in July), it looks to be a long summer for all of us. I'm probably going to be out of the house a lot this summer. At least i have a few people to hang out with, and I'll be turning 21 soon, so things are looking up. I just need the strength to make it out of this.