Isn't it ironic?

I like Tracy Mobley. She has early onset Alzheimer’s. She’s only 42. And was diagnosed 4 years ago. But she isn’t giving up. She’s talking about the disease, and how it affects her and the care-giving family. Ain’t always a pretty picture.

“My husband gets irritated when I ask the same question over just as many of you here do in going through with your LO's (loved ones),” Tracy wrote recently on the Alzheimer’s message boards. “The other day I had asked him something apparently repeatedly for about 3 days and his frustrations started to show. He said how many more dozens of times are we gong to go through this? My response was, ‘probably several more dozens.’ It isn't like we do these things on purpose. They just happen. What I don't understand is many of us have been dealing with this for several years and we should be used to it by now. It is just like raising a toddler and they repeat the same things. You don't get angry and frustrated with them. So why treat us any different?”

Tracy said her husband apologized. Which is exactly what he should have done.

“But we go through this all of the time,” she said. “We have only been dealing with this for about five or six years. You would think we'd have a system worked out by now.”

Well, I tried to encourage Tracy. I gave her a compliment.

“You are still a very perceptive woman if you notice your husband's frustration,” I wrote to Tracy. “Which means you are still a good communicator. And you are still able to do things that make your life better. Yes, you are able to go with the flow.”

Go with the flow happened to be the title on Tracy’s thread.

Anyway, Tracy wrote back, “Jim, no I am not a good communicator. If you would have read what I wrote you would have caught that. I don't remember. So I repeat myself a lot and that causes frustration. My perception is usually way off base because I can't seem to understand the simple things he may be telling me or I think it is totally something that it is not.”


Again, I replied in an effort to praise Tracy some more. “You are a better communicator than you think, Tracy,” I said. “You are staying active. You keep posting on this message board. That's more evidence that you know how to communicate. Don't sell yourself short. You may have lost the ability to take a compliment. But overall, you are doing darn good.”

Well, that brought a hostile response from a funny member of the Alzheimer’s Ladies Aid Society, a woman who calls herself "bb girl." She said I was wrong in telling Tracy that maybe she had lost the ability to take a compliment. That maybe it was insensitive.

“How LOW can you go???” bb girl asked me. “You constantly prove yourself! Tracy came to 'simply' vent about a issue in her home life & living with dementia & you just HAD TO MAKE ANOTHER comment. Maybe you should read the paragraph once again under Guidelines called Derogatory messages!"

Now, that’s funny. Even a care-giver such as bb girl doesn’t know a compliment when she sees one. But that’s the style of some of these ladies in the Ladies Aid Society. They think negatively all too often. That’s one thing that makes them pretty poor care-givers, in some instances. They are too mad in order to do a good job of it. They have to start thinking more positively, I keep telling them. Shape up. Be more like Tracy. Isn’t it ironic that some patients such as Tracy are in better control than the care-giver? –Jim Broede