As my mother in law ("Ma" aka Bette ) slips more and more in her ability to do things, we struggle each day to decide how to react to her problems. In her eighties, she is old beyond her years it seems to me. She can keep up with conversations to a great degree, and does pick up a lot about current events from the radio and TV, and calls and gets phone calls from a few friends and relatives regularly. She was on the verge of not being able to live in the house independently when we got here a few years ago. Now she is almost totally dependent, 'though. she is still the master of the house, and we are still just visitors. She does dress and care for herself still, and even though she gets confused and disoriented at times, does know basically what is going on, especially since Martha keeps her on track, lovingly doing things on demand to keep things as they were for as long and as much as possible. Even though she has almost no eyesight, she does daily duties as long as it is within her familiar territory and there are no surprises.

She would be shocked, I'm sure, by her previous self, if she realized how many of the hundreds of things she has totally forgotten about. Things that just a few years back had to be "just so", and done every day at the same time without fail, like adjusting the blinds, dusting her knick-knack mice and collectable door knobs. On top of this there are some things she does which I think she has forgotten why she does them. For instance she collects twigs in the yard, breaks them up and puts them in the wastebasket in the kitchen, to be taken out later. She remembers Wednesday is trash day, and helps take the trash and recycling to the street. Her one dedication is that she endlessly broadcasts birdseed in the yard, Johnny Appleseed style, going through 20 pound bags of birdseed sometimes twice a week. It is something to fill some time, she enjoys it and thinks it is vital, so who could stop her?

She is frail but smart enough to move appropriately slowly with baby-steps to avoid falls. She has had some depression, and we think some mini-strokes, but is usually stable and still functions fairly predictably. That is why it surprises us when she parts with reality sometimes. She sees imagined creatures in the yard, particularly at night. She sometimes insists that we look to see if we see them too. What do you say? When we say we can't see them, or say they must have just gone, she thinks we are mocking her or implying she is crazy. So we just try very hard ignore it and avoid the question so as not to hurt her feelings. "See them running right there?" she says, pointing with her crooked finger to moving targets out the door - making Z-like traces that would describe faster movement than any possible real creature could move. Of course there is nothing there.

She sadly also thinks - no, she "knows" - that the neighbors are watching her every day (of course they are not). Especially the neighbor boy (who we know is in college now and moved away several years ago). He is watching her even to the extent that he often is jumping back and forth from their roof to ours (30+ feet) to get a better look - in the dark, at night. We think there must be floaters in her eyes that are the starting point of these illusions, mis-interpreted by her mind so she takes them as reality.

Even in normal situations she can see very little - maybe just a little fuzzy dime sized area - and anything to her left seems to be invisible. It's hard to tell what she sees or doesn't because she doesn't admit readily that she can't see, or that she has a problem. She has improved a little on this, though, asking for help sometimes.

A specialist diagnosed her with a rare disease called Anton's Syndrome that seems to involve a degeneration of the blood vessels in the brain around the optic nerve in a very peculiar way. According to an article I found the internet, one frequent part of Anton's syndrome is deniability. For instance they told of one totally blind person who for years still believed strongly she could see. One way that this manifests itself in "Ma" is she trusts her failed eyes and perception totally when she should know that she can't see very well anymore. If it were I who couldn't see well or had reduced vision, I would trust the word of someone who could see to help me, not stubbornly insist that my perception was fine. Not so with this syndrome.


For instance she could be sitting at the little breakfast bar taking her pills. She knows which pill is which because they are in specific bottles and in the same place where Martha puts them for her. She will forget perhaps that she had picked up one bottle and moved it about 6 inches to the left. At that point she might be convinced that somebody took it from her because she can't see it. "Martha", she might say, "Have you been hiding my pills again? I wish you wouldn't touch my pills". or something like that. Even when we push her hand over to the bottle and she discovers it, it still doesn't seem to register in her mind that her head and eyes have been lying to her. Nothing is learned from this. She could not see it, therefore it was not there - - end of subject. She goes on as if nothing had happened.

In some ways I can understand this. If you saw something with your own eyes - an alien or something - you would probably be a believer since your senses have been truthful to you all your life. Why should you all of a sudden believe somebody else over your own perception? On the other hand, it is very hard for me to understand because I try to rely on science and logic, and you would think in such a fix my pragmatism would overcome an impossible event, but who knows. Very interesting.