Chapter 29: The First Follow-up

April 2, 2024

Mom had her one-year follow-up appointment at the Glenrose today.  It seems hard to believe that a whole year has already passed since the initial visits with my family doctor, the testing, and her first PET brain scan.

The doctor was really nice – but it was a little unsettling that I spoke to her privately while mom was in another room with a nurse.  It feels weird talking about mom behind her back when she’s right here…she can understand things perfectly fine, and she knows why we’re here.  I don’t like feeling like we’re putting her in the kids’ room while the grown-ups have a chat. 

I was told that there are three major factors which need to be managed to support mom’s short-term memory function: sleep, blood pressure, and calcium.  Well, not sure what we’re going to do about the first two – mom has been a poor sleeper her whole adult life and while she’s on medication for blood pressure, the act of having a reading done causes her anxiety and so I’m sure all of the official readings in her medical chart are exaggerated because of test stress.  The calcium thing was a surprise, though – apparently mom’s levels are too high!  I guess she took all the warnings on the risk of osteoporosis to heart – reducing her supplement will be easy enough. 

I asked about any risk factors that my sister and I might need to know about.  Don’t think I haven’t been stressing about that for the past year!  I was worried about the complete absence of a formal medical history for mom’s parents (no one kept medical records in India when mom was growing up…in fact, she doesn’t even have a formal birth certificate!).  Fortunately, the doctor reassured me that if what mom is going through was in any way hereditary, her symptoms would have shown up 20 years ago.  She also said that what mom’s condition isn’t unusual for a person in their mid-70s, but since we have normalized old age as being “young” now, our collective sense of what constitutes normal at various ages is a little distorted.  (She then cheerfully pointed out that with all of us living so long now, some kind of chronic illness or condition is likely to affect all of us at some point.  Good grief.)

Best news of the day is that the doctor said based on what she’s seen, mom’s likelihood of progressing from Mild Cognitive Impairment to formal dementia is only around 20-25%.  She’s also not ordering any more brain scans as apparently stability or progression is best measured by mom’s responses to standardized tests. On that front, mom’s score has dropped by 5 points since last year.  Sigh.

Still, not all is lost.  The doctor isn’t worried about mom maintaining her driver’s license and she scored 0 out of 15 on the test for geriatric depression, so that’s a relief (I was wondering). The doctor also approves of the daytimer and socialization exercises dad and I are trying to reinforce every day so maybe mom will start to be more on-side with these concepts since someone else is reinforcing them.

Conversation is the top-ranked recommended “exercise” so I will really try to work on mom getting organized to be more social. And then I guess we’ll see where we end up next year…

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