Good news, on the whole

Who would have thought, as I lay innocently in my crib, that I’d end up married to a buxom Danish lady (although I stretch the meaning of ‘lady’ somewhat here), living in the middle of snowy nowhere, and – this is the strangest part – officially defined as demented. I’ve been called many names in my time, some more obscene than others, but demented is a new one.

I assume that you, dear reader, have been following our travails over the past month or so (there may be a quiz later), so you know that after many tests a neuro-psychologist told me that a) I am (or have been) highly intelligent, but b) I now have Parkinson’s Disease with Dementia, or PDD among ‘friends’. I’ve not been able to find out a great deal about PDD, but then I don’t need a book or a website about it. I now live with it all day and every day, so I’ll learn as I go along.

A plus, at least, is that we have now become eligible for respite care. This means that on a regular basis – for now, every Monday from 9 to 3 like clockwork – Marie gets a break from me, and I get a rest from the woman’s incessant nagging and planning. The respite home I go to is a ‘normal’ family house that takes 8-10 users at a time, who are supervised by three ‘staff’. The word ‘users’ is theirs. I’m sure it’s very wrong if I call us the inmates or the patients. Some of the others call the staff ‘the grown-ups’, presumably because they have to take responsibility for everything. Maybe simply ‘us’ and ‘them’ will work.

So far, I’ve only been there twice, and both times it’s been an OK experience. I had been told that around half the people there speak English to some extent, and I find that surprisingly many are surprisingly happy to speak it. But not all of the people all of the time, of course, so I also get exposed to ‘raw’ Danish for a good part of the time, which lets me relax. Actually, I think there’s a good chance that, by a process of osmosis, these demented guys and dolls will teach me more Danish than I could ever learn in my old language school. We’ll see.

In other news, I visited a friend in Glasgow last weekend. I had an excellent and exhausting time, and was pleased to find that solo air travel is still well within my capacity. In other ways, too, it was a telling experience: as agreed in advance, Marie rang me every 2 hours from Denmark to remind me to take my medicine. In one way, it was a sweet expression of affection and concern. In another way, it was just a tad humiliating, like having your mum collect you from the playground, or – as has happened to me – being made to wear lederhosen in full view of my peers (who were also five years old, but that’s beside the point).

We are now scouring the web for a portable alarm that will free both of us from the straightjacket of the bi-hourly call. The trouble is that I have a bit of a history of switching off pill alarms without actually taking the pills that I’m supposed to be alarmed about. I’ll need something loud and insistent. Something very like Marie, in fact.