Lola's Getting Along

and doing pretty well. Most days lately she's been getting herself up at a decent time, sometimes even very early. Saturday morning I awoke to the TV blasting away at 9:30 a.m. BTW, it will take a pretty amazing movie to make me ever turn the Classic Movie Channel on again. The timing had Max laughing as I had told him there was a new law passed in Arlington against letting Jola Gayle sleep to 10:00 a.m. Now, since I rarely ever go to bed before 2:00 a.m., I don't think sleeping 8 hours until 10:00 a.m. to be beyond the pale. This puts me sooo off-schedule with the rest of the population around here.

Whatever the problem was with Lola's incontinence last week seems to have been a short one. That I know of she's had no more accidents. It's a puzzle as to whether she's still having some that the Depends are handling or whether she just had a little problem. She's tending to be like Joe was and wear them for days before changing them. Just yet, I'm uncomfortable with "checking her diaper" to see if it's wet. I'll hold off on that until there's some obvious sign that it's needed.

Regarding Mom's Parkinson's shaking, it's almost gone. She is down to taking 1/2 of a dopamine pill for it each morning and evening. She takes 1/2 a Xanax in the a.m. and 2 in the evening to help keep her asleep. It's been longer than I can remember since she needed an extra dose for a spell of the shakes. In trying to pinpoint when the improvement began, all I can say is that it was in the last 4-5 months. Definitely after Joe was out of the house she's had no shakes at all.

This tends to reinforce my gut feeling that Mom had anxiety tremors rather than true Parkinson's Disease.

According to this web site:

"In Parkinson’s disease, neurons that produce the neurotransmitter dopamine die off in the basal ganglia, an area of the brain that controls body movements. The brain can no longer control the body and people shake and jerk in spasms."

However, on the page discussing the stages of Parkinson's, the same website also says:

"Tremor may be less than earlier stages"

So I really don't know and likely will never know.  At this point, Mom is so elderly it's impossible to tell whether balance problems, slowness, shuffling, etc. are due to age or Parkinson's. One condition she's never had is the stiffness that is mentioned as a developing sign of Parkinson's.

On the whole, Mom seems to be in good spirits, in as good health as can be expected, and content just being.