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| My mother with the chihuahua, Irie, in 2007 |
Lewy Body Disease and Parkinson's are also associated with dementia.
Stroke is another frequent cause of impaired function of the brain, including the frontal temporal lobe, which is part of dementia.
Thank you to NPR this morning for the interview with Christine Hyung-Oak Lee, who had a stroke at age 33.
Her book is called Tell Me Everything You Don't Remember.
In the interview, Christine mentions "Depression is part of recovery from stroke," Christine says in the interview. "It's grieving for the loss of one's former self."
On the other hand, in the initial stage when she had only 15 minutes of short-term memory, she reported being happy and at peace.
"It's actually quite pleasant," she said.
That rang true for me. When my mother was living on the Memory Care floor of an assisted living, I noticed her general calm and contentedness and that of most of the other residents.
She didn't remember that her brother had died a year before, nor that her mother had died twenty years earlier. She had few expectations or worries.
She was more relaxed and happy than she had been during most of her former life, when she was married to my father, an alcoholic, and was working outside the home while raising four kids.
Of course, irritability is also part of ALZ to varying degrees and at different times of the day. Waiting for meals or for help is difficult.
My mother wanted to be at my house, not in a facility, and when I would leave after a two-hour visit, she didn't understand why she couldn't go with me.
Another positive note: I was encouraged to hear that Christine regained much of her brain function with time.
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