Blog 4: LOST FOR WORDS
After a couple of days on painkillers, the pain in Bill’s neck and back passed and he became his old self again. 2006 came to an end, I retired from teaching and we travelled from our home in Brisbane to Sydney to visit our second son, Ian, and his family.
It was to be a working holiday for Bill who planned to help Ian and his brother, Matthew, our third son, to complete a backyard shed and to put a roof on to a back veranda. The men worked hard for several days and, as was to be expected, they all became very tired. Bill became tired, too, but, though I could see that the exercise was taking its toll on him, I didn’t expect to hear the words that came out of Matt’s mouth at the end of day six.
“Mum,” he said, anxiously. “There’s something very wrong with Dad! He’s forgotten all the names of his tools. He’s saying things like:
Get me that thing ….. You know ….. That thing to do that!
And, Mum, we don’t know what tool he is talking about or what job the tool is supposed to be doing!”
I took Matt’s message on board but, really, I just didn’t know what to do about it. I think that I hoped that the names of the tools would come back to Bill once the job was over and he was rested.
In reality, they never did.
Fay
Ian commented to me that, while Bill was working with his sons on this project, that there was an instance when he noticed that Bill was taking a long time to do what would usually have been an everyday activity for him, e.g. measuring.
Suzi Carson
…lost for words…. S
Fay
Great comment, Suzi. You made me laugh. Ditto from me. Fay
Harold and Nola
At this time, we had no idea of these developments. The realization comes slowly, mainly because: who wants to believe it? This was a brother-in-law who ‘did things’! No, from our point of view it has to be a big mistake.
Fay
Yet, I don’t think that any of us could have done much more than we did. Bill himself was ….. not in denial …… but hopeful that things would improve. We did all we could to help him to continue in society as if nothing was going wrong. That was about all we could do under the circumstances.