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The following passage is a modified excerpt from the chapter about
Isobel Rhodes:
My mother always had a poor memory. When I was younger she would buy
candies, books, and other treats and hide them. She didn't want us to locate the treats before she was ready to give them to us but she never remembered her hiding spot. I found Halloween fireworks stashed in the back of a cupboard in the den in the middle of the following winter. When I was eleven and travelling to England, Mother bought me a book to read on the plane and hid it somewhere but couldn't remember where she'd put it. At age sixteen we moved to a new house and the book, Mr. Toad's Tales, was unearthed, with me now too old to be interested in reading it. Mother was forever misplacing her keys and glasses. She used to bribe me $1 to find her missing object. After awhile the $1 was not adequate for the time invested in the search, and I would decline her generous offer.
One of my mother's habits used to drive me crazy. She would start talking to me and cut off speaking mid-sentence, usually before the critical part. She would say: "Can you go to the kitchen and get me the…." I would hop around telling her to spit it out. She claimed I made her too nervous to remember the rest of the sentence.
As the years passed Mother's memory slowly worsened, but as she was nearing
seventy years old we just wrote it off as memory loss attributed to aging. She
continued to hide things and forget where they were. Increasingly she was unable to complete a sentence. She became repetitive asking us the same question or repeating the same story within a short period of time.
Within a couple of years we could see significant memory loss and confusion
surrounding common tasks such as banking, cooking, and housework. She forgot names of people she had known for years, and forgot places where she had lived or traveled to. Her brother, a retired doctor from England, came out for a visit in 1995 and sensed there was a problem. A few months later Mother traveled to England to visit him and during this visit my uncle and a cousin, who is a neurologist, gave her a mini-cognitive test commonly used to diagnose the presence of Alzheimer's Disease. Their living room diagnosis was that Mother was in the early stages of the disease.
My father retired from his job and became a full-time caregiver taking over the
cooking and other household chores.
Recipes My Mother Forgot is full of advice for caregivers including tips on vacations, and driving. The book does not get too technical on the clinical aspects of Alzheimer's Disease but does cover each stage of the disease. Sprinkled throughout the recipes are stories about my mother, and if you are caring for an Alzheimer's patient, you will recognize some of the behavior patterns.
How to Test Croissants For Freshness
One day Kerry and my parents stopped by a grocery store to pick up a few items. Kerry took Mother to the bakery department where he was picking out muffins. The croissants were on the shelf next to the muffins, and Mother asked him if he knew how to check croissants to see if they are fresh. She then proceeded to poke her
finger through several of the croissants and as each croissant crumbled, she
announced that they all passed the freshness test.
You will learn more about the health concerns of both the Alzheimer's patient and the caregiver while reading the story of a woman who suffers from this disease. A time saver, you can catch up on learning about Alzheimer's Disease while preparing a meal. You also receive satisfaction knowing you are helping a worthy charity,
because a portion of the proceeds from the sale of these books is donated to an
Alzheimer's organization
Recipes My Mother Forgot features family style recipes, an introduction to
Alzheimer's Disease, and a personal account of dealing with Alzheimer's Disease. The benefits are a good selection of tasty new meal ideas to try and a
non-intimidating learning experience.
Convenience, advice, knowledge, entertainment, and donating money to an
Alzheimer's organization await you with the purchase of each copy of Recipes My Mother Forgot. Click here to purchase a copy.
Published in paperback, otabind spine, 5½" x 8½", 149 pages.
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