Two Steps Back from the Precipice

In May, Mom had grown listless and a bit grumpy, and I thought dementia was pulling her down. Then the staff at Arbor Terrace found her conscious but unresponsive. At the ER, doctors discovered the cause for her recent decline: she had developed diabetes, and tests of her blood that should have been "around 110" were around 600. Doctors and nurses were alarmed.

Once she was back home on a regime of low-sugar meals and meds to control her blood sugar levels, she regained a lot of the energy and sparkle that had been missing for weeks. Her sentences are making sense more often. Even when she substitutes wrong words for the ones she means, the sense is in her tone. For instance, she told me and her doctors, "I have to frock all the time. All that mingling and dangling." Then she laughed, and we laughed along with her, the response she seemed to expect.

Today, she seemed tired, until a conversation with Laura about riding trains moved me to sing that wonderful old song that begins, "I took a trip on a train / and I thought about you." She snuggled closer and laughed and said, "Wonderful!"

In one photo, she welcomed a visit from her daughter Kim. In another, she's enjoying a visit with me. Laura is also present out of the frame.