Clock Drawing
I have read that a test for dementia is to ask the person in question to draw the face of a clock.
https://www.nia.nih.gov/health/what-are-signs-alzheimers-disease
I asked my mother to draw the face of a clock with the numbers and the hands. I guess I was in for a surprise. She drew a clock with hands sort of like the ones in "C". Well, OK. And the numbers? They went around the face of the clock in a clockwise order, but she had gotten to 8 by the time she got to where the 6 should be. By the time she got to 11 she was about where the 8 should be. She hesitated when she saw that she hadn't gone around the face of the clock back to 12, which she had very confidently put at the top. She puzzled over this for a moment but decided that was close enough. I realized that this wasn't mild dementia.
Some have told me that my Mom has had dementia for a long time. I would say she hasn't been dealing with a full deck for as long as I've known her, but dementia is another thing. She went off the rails enough when I was growing up that I was unnerved by it, and tried to find out if it was possible to have dementia at a young age. Of course, I got no answers. Someone said that early onset Alzheimer's results in death in a few years, and she probably would have already died if it were that, and they dismissed my concern. So the thought seemed to be that I was mistaken about her cognitive function. Well, too bad they didn't see her in action.
However, three years ago she could more or less drive. I saw when I was a passenger and she was driving that there were curious problems. Once a school bus was in the left lane. and began signalling that traffic was to stop because children were about to jump out and run in every direction. He had pulled into the left turn lane to do this, which I'm not sure is the ideal place. It told Mrs. Billingsley nothing. As the children disembarked, she continued her merry way down the road. The children were dodging her in a frightening way. She didn't notice. The bus driver noticed and began to honk furiously. She didn't even notice that. I said, "Don't you realize what you just did?" "What???" I explained it to her, but she still didn't seem to understand the problem. Boy, the law gets upset about that if they catch you doing that.
So she continued to drive for a while, going shopping, and to church, and over to see friends. She was still driving when my sister Charlotte and my nephew came here to live with us. Charlotte was convinced Mom had said she didn't need her car anymore and Charlotte could have it. There had to be some mistake, I thought. Most likely Mom had a conversation where she didn't hear the question and just said something agreeable.
But after Charlotte's death, Mom went a lot further off the rails than I had ever seen before. It wasn't gradual at all. Out of nowhere she began to hallucinate and suffer delusions. For one thing Charlotte's ghost visited. This really frightened her. Ever since then I have left most of the lights in the house on at all times to try and discourage any more ghosts. Mom didn't like being bossed around in any way, always feeling that she should be the one in charge. One day I explained to her that she wasn't in charge anymore. The situation had changed and I was now the one in charge. I asked her not to fight me about it because that's how things needed to be. She saw the logic to this and thankfully agreed. She.had all sorts of other problems. She had difficulty swallowing, which seemed to also come out of nowhere. She had trouble sleeping, which didn't seem like her. Her balance was really terrible, and she began to fall constantly. I couldn't pick her up myself, so I had to call 911 at least daily.
At Christmas my brother visited and brought several pies, and candy and cookies as gifts. Mom seemed to him to be doing OK, and she ate pie and chatted. Yeah. Really, she was having big trouble. When he left she was in a panic and begged me to take her home. She was home. No, no, where we've been living. "OK, Mom, you need to take a nap." She took her nap, and I rested a while too, trying to figure out what to do. I noticed that she had taken a nosedive after eating a lot of sugar. So later that day I asked her to go on the ketogenic diet with me.
I was extremely relieved at her positive response to the keto diet. I felt that she had gone back to a mild dementia level. She didn't fall except on rare occasions. Her ability to swallow returned. The hallucinations seemed to be gone, except for once when it snowed, and she saw me out in the snow. But I wasn't in the snow. I was still in my room sleeping. But she seemed to stop hallucinating after that. I thought I just needed to be more cautious with the carbs.
One might suppose that I would have rushed her to a neurologist or psychiatrist or some other expert about the cognitive decline. But I didn't see the point. I knew they couldn't fix the problem. Getting her to the doctor was incredibly difficult. It also had sometimes ended in disaster. The one thing that really helped her was a keto diet. Would any of them have prescribed that? I doubted that they knew about it.
I would say that my take away from Mom's clock drawing is that the reins probably need to be tighter on the diet. Maybe a strict carnivore diet for a few days. She did another disturbing thing today. My stepbrother stopped by to visit and asked if we were OK for company. Sure. But I told Mom she needed to get completely dressed. Then while he was here, suddenly she began to pull off her clothes to get more comfortable. "Mom, no! We have company!" He saw the situation and left quickly. This is a new misbehavior with Mom. I know. Carnivore diet plus MCT oil. Then try the clock drawing test again and see if she has improved.
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