By the time we left for the American Discovery Trail in May of 2011, Cindy already had trouble communicating. The trouble was not rooted in not knowing words, or even memories. The trouble was rooted in something akin to stress. Cindy struggled to answer questions addressed to her.
I knew she often knew the answers, they just couldn’t come out under the pressure of answering someone’s question. As we hiked across the country she got better at answering questions … if they were addressed to me. People would ask us about events that happened along our journey. Remarkably to me, Cindy sometimes recalled these recent events before I could … as long as I was the one being asked the question. There are two lessons here.
The first lesson is that having trouble communicating is another symptom that occurred early enough to be alleviated with our “treatment” of walking across the country. Don’t despair when you first might catch this, just start living right (including plenty of exercise and the removal of all stress).
The second lesson is you never know what an Alzheimer’s patient perceives and knows. Even in regards to short term memories they may have retained more than would ever be apparent, because those memories might never be extracted. Cindy is at a point now where I doubt she could say my name if I asked her, but I have no doubt she knows what my name is. From my intimate observation of a few Alzheimer’s patients I have concluded that Alzheimer’s is a disease that attacks output more than input.
