"lost in current time"?

Hope5757

Tam Cummings lists this as a late stage 5 characteristic. But I’m not quite sure what it means?

Also, recently I’ve noticed that when MIL refers to “my family”, she always means her nuclear family as a child. Is this just an indication of her older memories being stronger than more recent memories?

We had a recent hospitalization that seems to have drained MIL’s cognitive reserves. Now, I’m pretty sure she was already in stage 5 but was able to fool everyone (including me).

I recently posted a comment about MIL’s witty quips. The hospitalization showed me it was just a skill she had, like @harshedbuzz’s father’s ability to do serial subtraction. When MIL can’t remember or is confused, she’s able to come up with a quip. And society has trained us to laugh appreciatively and move on. She was asked “so why were you hospitalized?” She replied with perfect pitch and timing, “I didn’t like being home!” But, when I asked her if she remembered, she didn’t remembered the ailment or the events leading up to the hospitalization.

Middle stage requires so much accommodation and guesswork.

M1

Hope my partner has absolutely no sense of time- time of day, season, year, anything. It's quite odd. She thinks both of her parents are still alive (she's 83). She doesn't know how long we've been a couple (30 years) and remembers nothing of our past. She has no clue that she's been in MC for two years and thinks she's going home "tomorrow.". The upside of this is i can tell her I'll call her as soon as i get home (she doesn't have a phone) and that I'll see her in the morning, even if it's going to be a couple of days before i visit. No consequences to these fiblets. Hard to imagine what it must feel like to her.

Hope5757

Thank you M1. So “lost in time” just means having no sense of passage of time and/or where one is currently in one’s own timeline?

Emily 123

Hi Hope,

I used to wonder too, but as my mom has advanced I see that there's no ability to sense the passage of time. It's as if she's adrift in a little bubble, and has no references to the time of day. Until recently she could still look at the printed meal times for her MC and check her watch and know dinner was coming up, but if you asked her randomly she wouldn't be able to tell you what meal was next.

harshedbuzz

@Hope5757

FWIW, I found the middle stages of dementia hardest all around with my dad who came into dementia with a challenging personality as his baseline. Later stages have their own kind of awfulness, for sure, but you may find it easier.

Many PWD maintain the ability to deflect from and disguise their deficits with humor or pleasantries for quite some time. This is often part of something called showtiming in which a PWD can hold it together briefly for a doctor's appointment or visit from a family member who will come away thinking the caregiver is catastrophizing the condition of said PWD. Dad routinely did this with doctors (especially his geripsych trading curses in Yiddish— impressive as he was formerly an altar boy) and his brother (who would then call to tell me our decisions to place were premature). I had to resort to video clips of dad raging at home to get the psych to understand why we were asking for an increase in his meds. Unless you are with a person 24/7, it can be hard to get a real bead on staging dementia.

In stage 5, PWD often become disoriented to time/place. For dad this meant both he was unaware of the time or day, day of the week or season and also that he had no sense of the passage of time. He also sort of time traveled like you're describing with MIL. Memories seem to be LIFO— he seemed to work backwards from present time to childhood. His ancient aunties used to fuss about what a sweet little boy he'd been. I thought they were crazy. As an adult there was clearly some mental health issues running in the background, but at the very end he regressed back to the sweet kid.

As he progressed, he started to get hazy on my late sister— was she sick or had she died? He'd hallucinate his golf buddies visiting and once admonished me not to sit on a chair because Phil was already sitting there. Months before, he returned mentally to the time when he was teaching in the 1970s and talk about the intrigues of his faculty friends and ask mom to find his ghastly plaid polyester knit sports coats to wear. Later, when we were hanging pictures in the new house, and he accused me of stealing a Degas. We wracked our collective brains around that one until I recalled a picture taken in 1959 that had a museum poster featuring dad's "dancing girl" in the background. Mom said they tossed it when they moved from the apartment to their first home.

This also can apply to place. In stage 6 dad used to think he was in Florida much of the time. This made life easier as he was angry we'd moved him back to PA so I could help mom. Easier, except during hurricane season when he look out at the calm, sunny yard and describe the howling wind blowing palm trees. My aunt also was disoriented to place. She was one of those PWD who maintained their sunny demeanor— even her delusions and hallucinations were delightful. When I visited her not long after she went into MC after her DH died, she told me she lived in the post-war student housing at Rutgers and that her husband was away on maneuvers. Another time she looked out her window past a stand of trees and describe the view of the Casco Bay she's had at her home in Maine— even describing gulls fighting over a clam.

HB

Hope5757

Thank you @Emily 123 .

I really like the word picture of a bubble. It’s cheering. My MIL wears an Apple watch. She looks at it and can read the numbers but they don’t seem to provide any context to her day. 6:00 doesn’t imply dinner time, etc. It’s just 6.

harshedbuzz

https://alzconnected.org/discussion/comment/204482#Comment_204482

That would be my dad. He would blurt out street signs while I drove but they had no context for him at all.
HB

Hope5757

Thank you @harshedbuzz for you informative response. I always learn a lot from your posts.

Your description of LIFO AND being disoriented to time/place was very helpful and clarified a recent conversation. MIL and I were driving and she remarked that the grass was STILL green. I said something about April showers bringing May flowers. MIL said “my family never lived anywhere with flowers.” I was totally confused as her husband absolutely loved flowers and they employed a mowing/landscaping service that planted and tended flower beds and planters each week. Her response made it clear that in her mind, “family” is the family of her youth.