Please shed some light—my 65-yr-old husband has both short and long term memory issues, but no diagnosis despite two neurologists, and substantial testing including an MRI.
He has been making faces for awhile now—anybody know what this is about? It’s sort of a squint, but all the way down to his mouth. He has always made these faces when intent upon a repair project, but now he does it all day. When he sees me looking at him, he changes his mouth to a normal position. I’ve ignored, nagged, talked, etc. No clue.
I asked him to change out some batteries recently, and he looked all over the new package to find the voltage. AAA—who cares? He said they needed to be the same voltage, reminding me he had taken high school electronics. Then he referred to them as “dry cell.” It was like another era.
Please shed some light and help me understand what is taking place.
Go to Alz.org and read up about dementia and what to expect. Order some books on Amazon like The 36 Hour Day and/or:
https://www.amazon.com/Speaking-Dementia-Making-Sense-All/dp/1546463402/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=speaking+dementia&qid=1619715358&sr=8-3
Oftentimes, the MRIs and CT scans don't show anything significant in terms of dementia. My mother has what we believe to be vascular dementia, and her scans are clean. She scored a 19 on the MoCa cognition exam in 2016, however, so that's how the doctors knew she had progressive dementia, especially with drawing the clock (she was unable to) indicating an executive brain function deficit. With VD, they have good days and bad days; some days she's lucid and other days she's 'riding the bus to NYC to visit her papa' who's been dead since 1946. Some days she won't know what's going on at ALL; other days she's more with it (she lives in Memory Care).
It's a tough situation for YOU b/c you're not sure WHAT is going on. A diagnosis would be helpful, for sure, but the doctor(s) should at least be able to GUIDE you a bit with what to expect, no? Then again, I've found a lot of ignorance myself with these so called 'experts' and what they DON'T know about dementia! I've learned more on this site and from watching Teepa Snow videos on YouTube than from any doctors I've ever come in contact with!
Wishing you the best of luck learning all you can about how to deal with DH and also about how to care for YOURSELF in this process. Don't forget there are TWO lives that are getting affected here!