Vitamins and Supplements and Catalogs, Oh My!

The vitamin and supplement industry loves people like my father. According to Statista, a statistics gathering website, “in 2010, sales of <vitamins and nutritional supplements in the United States > reached 28.1 billion U.S. dollars and were expected to increase to some 36 billion dollars by 2017.”

On my parents’ kitchen table is a little tray about 10”x12” filled with pill bottles. Some are prescriptions, but most are supplements that my dad has ordered from catalogs he received in the mail.

“You should try this,” he tells me. “It will do blahblahblahblah” words he’s read in the catalog that promise a miracle. He has heart failure. He’s 87. He has a stent and a pacemaker. He pays who knows how much a year for pills that promise a better life.

He holds a bottle in the air pointed at me: “this has saved my life.”

A few years ago, mom went off with my sister for her birthday for a few days and I stayed with my dad. I invited an old friend and her mother who had been our neighbor years ago and had moved away to my parents’ house because they were coming in town. When mom returned and found out they’d been over and had tea at the kitchen table I could tell she was a little upset. Then it dawned on me that all the pill bottles on the table bothered her.

My dad has dementia and he doesn’t think clearly. Meanwhile, nutritional supplement sales increase.

Organization

Today he says he wants to hang the calendar by the light hanging over the kitchen table so he can access it better. I said, “Isn’t there a calendar sitting beside the phone?” “Yes, but you have to lay the phone down to get to it and then you’ve lost contact with the person you’re talking to.”

He uses a small (6” x 6”) calendar that came in the mail. It has one month per page and a square for each day. The calendar is folded and stapled so he has to open it to the month he wants each time. Of course, there are better calendars for him to use, but this is the one he wants to use. I buy my mother a daily journal calendar each Christmas as well as making a hanging calendar with family pictures for her. She seems to do well with these.

Another organization problem area is that he uses the kitchen table for a desk although there’s a desk sitting next to the table. The phone is on the table and it has the volume control on the handset so it’s easy for  him to adjust the volume (since he’s hard of hearing). So, he uses the phone at the table and needs a calendar and notepaper there to schedule doctor appointments and make notes. That’s why the table has become the desk. And it gets more and more cluttered with each visit I make. But so does the desk even though it is used only for offloading the table clutter.

Mom has told me that she has asked him to clear some of the desk clutter before I’ve visited which he has done. I know if I suggested he move the phone to the desk and clear off some table clutter that he would get mad. So that probably won’t happen.

Meanwhile, my dad seems to think the solution to making his calendar more accessible is to hang it from the ceiling light fixture.

Snoring

My dad is a snorer, and not just a light one: loud snores that wake you up. And long gaps before the next breath. Lots of talking in his sleep and slinging his arms

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I snore and I’m told I’m a “world-class” snorer. In 2016, I started going to a dentist who asked me if I snored. He wanted me to take a sleep test. I did and it showed I have sleep apnea. He told me that sleep apnea causes a loss of oxygen to the brain and that over time this can be a detriment to our mental processes. He wanted me to start using a “night guard” to keep my windpipe open while I slept and keep the oxygen flowing to my body and brain.

The light bulb went off in my head then: my dad has had a lifetime of low oxygen to his brain. Could that have been part of the cause of his behavior today? Certainly it could be a factor in his dementia.

I’ve had friends comment to me upon meeting my dad that “he’s weird,” or “he’s a kick!” Some laugh off his odd comments. They didn’t have to live with him, or be raised by him. It’s disturbing. But now, the focus is on the dementia, and helping mom who has had over 60 years dealing with this obsessive, controlling, demented man.

Dementia

When my dad was 85, something led me to ask his doctor to prescribe a psychological exam for him. His doctor texted me back that he was pretty sure my dad had dementia and he didn’t think a psychological exam was necessary.

Why had he not told me this before? It was so obvious. Of course, dementia was written all over my dad, but it was lost among his other behaviors.

My dad fell this summer when he was at Walmart. He was leaving and did a faceplant outside the front door. Emergency was called and the EMTs checked him out and determined that he was OK enough to drive home alone like he said he wanted to do. So he did.

When he got home (about 5 miles away), he told mom what had happened. Soon the bruises started showing on his face. She took him to the emergency room. He had a broken nose and there was some concern about his eyes. They released him. My sister sent me a picture of him. He looked like a monster: black eyes, bruised and swollen cheeks.

I started thinking “head trauma? brain injury?” I sent a letter to his doctor telling him what had happened and asking him to check this out. That was in May. This week he’ll have a cognitive test. The doctor will go over the results with him next month. I’m hoping for a formal dementia diagnosis and some new prescriptions to help with his behavior.

OCD

When I was 48, I was between jobs and visiting my parents for a few weeks in the summer. I was sitting in the living room when my dad brought in the mail and handed me a newsletter that had come in the mail saying I might like to read it. It was a generic “seniors” newsletter but I didn’t have anything else to do so I looked through it. 

I read a letter to a senior counselor by a woman talking about the changes in her husband since his retirement. It said he had started buying lots of baseball caps or keeping different beer cans and that he didn’t want her to drive so much or do some of the things she normally did away from the house. The advice was that this was obsessive/compulsive behavior that had been brought on by the change in lifestyle her husband’s retirement had caused. 

I remember looking up and as if for the first time, seeing all the piles of clutter, the railroad and train pictures, knowing the stacks of model train boxes and model train displays in the basement. Thinking of the endless flashlights that my dad had brought in the house. He’s obsessive, I thought.

I had a friend who had discussed her OCD condition with me so I was familiar with the term but had never noticed it in my own father. How could this be? I reason that since he had always been that way that it seemed normal to me. I’d just chunked it in with the rest of his “weird” behavior. Now I was beginning to see different strands of his behavior.

Controlling

I remember a time after my sister and I were in high school that my dad didn’t want mom to work outside the home. Even his mother had said that mom would make a good real estate agent. But, no, he didn’t want mom to work. Hmmm, I wondered why, finally. It hadn’t phased me at the time when I was a teenager. He’d always made the decisions and gotten his way. There was no discussion between my parents.

I could go off on a lot of tangents about this. How I noticed when I spent the night with friends that their parents sat and talked whereas mine did not. How I ignored my parents’ arguing, my dad’s yelling and loud voice and how that conditioned me to ignore it in my relationships after I grew up. How when I look at pictures now of my mother then, I see depression.

When I was 12, I fell in love with the Rocky Mountains and determined to move to Colorado when I grew up. However, when I graduated from college, I did not move. I did not have the courage to leave my family and move across the country where I knew no one. Finally, when I was 33, I did move. I stored some things with my parents including my summer clothes since it was fall when I moved.

I remember a couple things happened then with my dad’s involvement with me. When I went home for Christmas and was riding in the back seat of my parents’ car with them in the front, I asked if I could use the car to visit a friend. The answer was “no.” My dad didn’t think it was safe for me to drive his car an hour away to where I used to live even though I’d driven my own car 1500 miles by myself from Atlanta to Denver two months before. I remember saying out loud at the time that someone in the front seat wasn’t thinking straight. The other thing was that in the spring, I needed my summer clothes sent to me since I had to travel to the tropics for work. I realized then that my dad had thought that I would not like living in Colorado away from home, or maybe that it wouldn’t work out for some reason and was holding my summer clothes since he believed I’d be back before I needed them.

Now I see that both these actions were controlling.

Weird

Weird.

We always described my father as weird. You’d have to do things differently around him because he was weird. Things were difficult to do around him because he would ask questions that would stop the natural flow of activity. He would get bogged down in the details of directions.

When did it start? Who knows? There are myriad examples from my 58 years. When I was growing up, I remember mom cut the grass one day, but when my dad got home from work, he cut it again. There was nothing wrong with the way mom had cut it. It was as though my dad had to put his “stamp” on it. That’s the last time mom cut the grass. Why should she when he would “redo” it?

My folks were still using an aerial antenna in 2013 when I visited them one summer. I’d recently gotten satellite TV and wanted them to have it so they could get more TV channels. I arranged for a provider to come to their house but before I could tell my dad, the company called while I wasn’t there and my dad talked to them. So when I got home, he was very angry at me since I hadn’t told him my plans. It was as though it was an invasion of his home. How dare I plan for a stranger to wire his house for satellite? The gaul of me! This was before I knew he had dementia. My dad had been a telephone installer in his career and had wired many office buildings in Atlanta and prided himself on wiring the phone system in his own house.

When I was 54, I had some free time on my hands and I decided I was going to figure him out. I thought about his behavior objectively instead of just complaining when he got upset about something. With my new mindset, I just observed his behavior and tried to classify it. For example, wanting to pick me up at the airport instead of doing what I asked (which was to pick me up at the light-rail station closer to his house). “I’ll come pick you up at the airport. There’s no need for you to take the train.” I realized that this was controlling behavior.