There has been more and more talk lately about Donald Trump having Alzheimer’s or some other form of Dementia. From what I have seen and heard, I believe it is true.

Who Am I?

I’m a son and grandson who watched a first grandmother and then a father spiral down the Dementia/Alzheimer’s drain. This isn’t a disease family that comes on all at once like the flu, it’s gradual, unpredictable, and initially intermittent. That’s one of the main things they don’t tell you in the list of Ten Early Signs. Yes, I’ve written about Alzheimer’s before on this blog. I’ve written about Trump and the lives he has ruined as well.

While I do, in this current decade of my career, develop embedded systems for medical devices, I’m not a licensed medical practitioner. If you get an injection or have an IV bag hung there is a north of 80% chance the bag, line, and/or syringe were tested with one of the devices I helped create. When you get wheeled into a hospital and hooked up to a patient monitor there is a very high probability it is one with my software in it simply because that manufacturer controlled something like 80% of the market, but they have multiple models and I only helped create one.

Where Do I Speak From?

No, I’m not speaking to you as a medical professional or even an embedded systems developer. Today I speak to you as the grandson who repeatedly went to the nursing home to visit his grandmother as she disappeared memory by memory. One who also witnessed the other Alzheimer’s/Dementia patients there, and how they behaved. As a son who went every Wednesday and Sunday to visit his father during his six years in a nursing home for many of those years. One who made friends with others at life’s twilight residing there. The staff started calling the group my crew.

I feel the need to tell you because most every one of you abandoned your “loved ones” at such places. Not only did I go twice per week so my mother could get a break from going every day, we went on Thanksgiving for the meal. On Christmas we took all our presents to his room so he could participate in the Christmas experience. I can count on one hand the number of families who were there for those holidays. Counting the number of families who came to visit at all wouldn’t require both hands.

You didn’t see this because you chose not to.

I see Trump at the tipping point for Alzheimer’s. That point where the screw-ups can’t be covered up. After this point it is a very debilitating disease. The body may live for years, but that which made it a person you cared about disappears like an object in a magic act.

Cognitive Tests

You can wipe your ass with those cognitive tests. I’m sure Trump lied about taking one or he had a doctor with the same level of ethics as the one who diagnosed him with bone spurs to get out of The Draft. Alzheimer’s is an intermittent disease. My father passed his cognitive tests with his doctor, yet Dementia did him in. I had set him up with a computer and he had been checking email using Thunderbird for years. One day he asked me something and I told him I had emailed it to him.

“Okay, how do I get it?”

“You check your email.”

“How do I do that?”

I’m not making this up. It was after that we arranged for the cognitive test which he passed. He only checked email a few times after that on his own. I had to help him otherwise. Be sitting there and tell him what to click on to open messages and how to reply. Each time for each message.

The only real test is a brain scan. Don’t be shocked if insurance won’t cover it. Insurance companies tend to only pay for diagnostics to prove you have something treatable.

Alzheimer’s Storm

The only way those cognitive tests “work” is if the patient has really advanced Alzheimer’s or is in the moment of what I call an “Alzheimer’s storm.” These go from mere moments in length to days. Sometimes the individual becomes violent. Initially they can be funny. My father used to cuss and holler about not being able to find a wrench he just had in his hand.

“Check your pocket.”

“It’s not in my . . . oh.”

One of my “crew” from the nursing home could tell from the tail lights what any year and make of car was all the way back to 1936. Quite a few people in the area had antique cars and on nice days they would drive past the nursing home. It was a nice thing. When this person had an Alzheimer’s storm he would suddenly want us to help him find his wife. He was adamant they got separated when they got their this morning. Truth was she passed away many years before he came there. He was at the funeral and everything. Sometimes I would wheel him around down all of the halls “looking for her” because if I hummed a tune he liked or remembered he would start humming or even singing it. This would end the storm.

Storms go the other way. Most of you will have heard of the old man getting lost trying to find his way home when he is walking down the street he lives on. Storms tend to oscillate between fixation and obliteration of thought.

Fixation

One thing I have realized, given all the Alzheimer’s patients I have talked with over the years, is they all fixate. It’s not all the time and might not be the same thing each time, but they all fixate. They tend to fall into three main categories:

  • Always worked before
  • Never happened
  • Not Quite – Certainly didn’t happen but is based on something real

Not Quite

For most of those I have met this is the blending of a past memory with their current reality.

Grandma

I’m tired. They had us up chasing cows this morning.

At the time this became one of Grandma’s fixations, she was in a wheel chair. I have no doubt she was tired. When they near the end Dementia/Alzheimer’s patients seem to want to sleep. Maybe that is just the bodies natural method of informing us we are near death?

This is a “Not Quite” because she grew up on a farm when most of the work was done by horses. Fence wasn’t cheap and there were always hundreds of other things needing doing on a farm. Yes, as a girl she had to chase cattle back into the pasture many times.

Dad

Boy, I worked all night, I’m tired. They took me to the basement to fix the machine that runs this place. For a while it was your car, that foreign job, that was powering the place, but we shut it off after I got the engine fixed.

Exact wording changed from time to time. When he was in that shit-hole on Route 50 (no I won’t name it) this was his “Not Quite” fixation. He was in a wheelchair at the time and the place kept him drugged up so they wouldn’t have to do much. Wasn’t even able to sit up straight in the wheelchair, let along walk or turn a wrench.

He was a farmer and truck driver who went to the Navy to become a mechanic. Both he and I have turned a lot of wrenches over the years. He certainly wasn’t turning any there.

Trump

Trump claims to have beaten the “Bush dynasty,” the “Clinton Dynasty,” and then we beat Barack Hussein Obama and whatever the hell dynasty that is!

This is a whopper of a “Not Quite.”

Barack Obama never lost a presidential election, he served two terms. Speaking as a real Republican, I can say he wasn’t a bad President. Obama Care grows in popularity every year. In fact Obama bitch slapped him for all that “birther” stuff.

Did we fake the moon landing?

He ran against Jeb Bush, the Bush that couldn’t get anything right who distanced himself from his family. Given the level of incompetence both Georges displayed as President, being as dumb as Jeb took some doin’!

Hillary did lose to Donald but didn’t bring hubby into the campaign until late from what I remember. Most likely she didn’t want him knocking up an intern or volunteer and have that be “the story.”

Never Happened

Grandma

I know grandma had several of these, I just don’t remember what they were. Most of them were people long since deceased having “stopped by for a visit.” I didn’t even know who they were because they died before I was born. This was shortly before she lost her ability to have conversations.

Dad

Dad had a few of these as well. One of the more shocking ones was asking us if we ran into Jolie. She just left, you must have met her in the hall. My cousin Jolie died in her late twenties from liver cancer. She had been gone three decades when this happened and it happened a lot over the course of one year. Another one was claiming I can walk, they just had me walking this morning. He hadn’t walked for over a year when that started and it went on for years until he lost the ability to have conversations. One forgets all of the fixations that only lasted a day or two. He was in the last nursing home six years suffering from Dementia/Alzheimer’s and much of that is time one wants to forget.

Trump

Fraudulent claim of stolen election

You’ve all heard him beat that drum. It was criminal fraud the moment he said it. Those who supported it, like Fox News, have had to cough up nearly a billion dollars in damages.

No evidence of fraud

Always Worked Before

Grandma

You busy on the farm? . . . Oh you can’t do nothing on a farm this kind of weather.

Towards the end grandma fixated on that phrase, the pause, and the follow up, even on a sunny day in July. She was in a nursing home. There wasn’t much “new” happening for her. As Alzheimer’s took more and more of her memories she clung to that one conversation starter. It was her go-to club in the golf bag as the saying goes. She wouldn’t remember using it just ten minutes earlier. You would hear it 3-5 times per hour, sometimes more. Basically she would blurt it out any time you stopped talking for a bit.

Dad

Mostly dad resorted to making funny faces or flipping people off. It was his go-to thing whenever he needed to cover not hearing or understanding what someone had said/asked. He would also reach for it when the conversation trailed off while he was awake. Now that I think back, it was his way of diverting attention from his situation. Unlike some of his friends in there, he didn’t still have his wits. He had enough of his wits to know he didn’t have his wits. That’s probably the cruelest part of this disease.

Trump

When he is caught in crime or just a lie, he picks a fight with everyone around him to confuse and divert attention from the real issue of his crime. It always worked before. As long as a SuperPAC is funding the lawyers he can start as many battles as he wants.

What is truly shocking is how he will string together completely unrelated things without even the tiniest shred of conscience or ethics. That whole Nikki Haley was in charge of security on January 6th wasn’t the biggest lie, it was the 10,000 troops comment.

Summary

Given my life experience, it is my firm belief that Trump as at the tipping point where Alzheimer’s goes from ludicrous and sometimes funny to completely debilitating. This switch will go quick.