I Lost It at the Gym

Michael, who runs the Brain Gymnasium at Atria, apparently has an exercise that he does each week.  The group counts from one to 60, one person at a time.  Only if your number has a four sound in it (four, forty, etc.) or if it is a multiple of four, instead of saying your number, you say "medicare."

If your number has a seven or is a multiple of seven, you say "social security."

So it would go around the group...one, two, three, medicare, five, six, social security, etc.  

For numbers like 14 which have both a 4 and are multiples of 7 (or vice versa), you say "medicare and social security."

This is pretty tricky for people with old brains.  You have to remember where in the count the person before you is, you have to know the next number, and you have to figure out if it applies to either the 4 or 7 rule (or both).  The first time we played, last week, I messed up on 14, not realizing that I was to say both "medicare" and "social security."

It was already a difficult morning for my mother.  She really didn't want to go to the class at all, because she was already feeling "stupid" because she never knew the answers. But because I had come specifically to go with her (and now that I have been accepted by the class, to go for me too!) she came with me.

Michael always starts with a date question.  Today it was "what was the date four days before tomorrow."  This requires knowing what day it is today and then working the math back to four days before tomorrow...it also requires that you know that June has 30, not 31 days!  My mother had no clue what day it was today.  I reminded her that tomorrow was a holiday and she immediately knew that tomorrow was the 4th of July.  While she was figuring out what was 4 days before July 4, Michael was talking with Larry, who had written "June 31."  

By the time Michael came back to my mother, she not only did not have the answer, she also forgot that two seconds before she had figured out that tomorrow was 4th of July (and denied hotly that I had never helped her with that!), but she had no clue what four days before July 4 was.

She sat back in her chair in that "I'm gonna sit here but I'm not going to do a damn thing because I'm stupid and I'm embarrassed" attitude that she adopts.  You know--like a teenager.

Michael is great with her.  He stresses over and over again that this is not school, that there are no wrong answers, and that the purpose of the exercises is just to get you to exercise your brain.  The others in the class are also very supportive.  They have been coming, some of them, for years and they keep telling my mother that it gets better.

In fact, the young staff member, probably in her 20s, got the date question wrong too!

So then we started counting and I watched her struggle so hard, and become so dispirited because she couldn't remember what came after 14.  I watched her over and over, with Michael's guidance, trying to get the right answer and I just wanted to rush out of the room and cry.  At one point she said "you'd never know I was an accountant, would you?"

I watched and surreptitiously kept wiping away tears to prevent people from seeing that I was crying...and especially to keep my mother from seeing that I was crying. I hurt so much for her because I know how this must make her feel, and I know that she never wants to go to these classes again, but I also know how important they are for her, if she is going to slow down her mental decline at all.

The last group exercise we did was a grid with groups of 3 letters in each box.  TEB  RGI SAS HAW TVI LOU, etc.  When you combined the three letters with other groups of three (up to four groups), you ended up with a list of 10 states.  It was fairly easy for me, the hardest one being West Virginia, which showed up as TVI WES NIA and RGI (scattered throughout the other 3-letter groupings).  To my delight, my mother actually found EIGHT of the states.  And she was smiling.

At the end of the session, Michael stressed that the lesson he wanted her to take home was not to be so hard on herself.  She laughed, gave him her coy look, and agreed to do that.  But when he asked her again what the lesson was, she couldn't remember.

But she admitted on the walk back that she had a good time part of the time and when we got back to the apartment, she spent about 10 minutes (until I left) looking over this week's home play (not home "work" because that would be school) before she decided she wasn't going to do it.  Once again, I got the word part of the home play very easily, and can't for the life of me figure out how to do the math/spatial reasoning part of it.

Obviously this Brain Gymnasium is good for me too.  But next time I'll bring a couple of tissues in my pocket.

I brought her clothes home to wash again.  This time I will start adding back the clothes that she didn't recognize and took to the front desk to "give back" to whoever left them in her apartment.

Sometimes it's Heartbreaking

My mother was a stay at home Mom until I went to high school.   Karen was 4 years younger, so she was in her last years in our 8-grade grammar school.  Up until that time she was the Mom who sat at the kitchen table with a bowl in her lap, peeling apples for her famous apple pie.  She was the Mom who helped us with homework, who helped the Girl Scout leaders when they asked for volunteers, and who kept the house spotless.

But as she was starting to be faced with a mostly empty nest and a difficult husband, she saw an ad in the paper from Bank of America, which was looking for typists.  She went in for an interview and set her own conditions (because of my father's work schedule, she could only work 3 days a week, they would be a different three days every week and she couldn't tell which days they would be until the end of one week).   Amazingly they hired her.

She started working 3 days a week, gradually worked up to a full time job, as she felt more comfortable being away from home, and eventually was promoted to a Trust Officer, an office she held for several years, during which time she was also vice president of the Business & Professional Women's club and gave speeches regularly. 

She was also the treasurer in any organization she joined.  She kept the books for our household.

And so it is heartbreaking to watch her struggle to do simple math problems in the Brain Gymnasium, which we attended today for the first time.  It requires thinking to figure out the problem.  The first was to tell what was the date the day before two days from tomorrow.  Her main problem was that she had no idea what today's date was, but she was so embarrassed.  She didn't notice that two other people in the group had problems with the question too.

We have been attending "Keep Your Brain Sharp," which, to tell you the truth, is just plain boring.  The leader, who is not particularly vivacious, gives assignments like "list the presidents starting with the current one and so backwards and see how many you can name" or "make a list of all the animals that you might see around here."  Then she leaves the room, comes back in, has us read our lists and gives another list. I have been taking her to the class because it helps her brain work, but today we tried the other memory program and it is head and shoulders (and perhaps torso also) above Brain Sharp.

Michael, the leader of this group, is extremely outgoing, charismatic, and very, very encouraging, telling my mother over and over again that there are no wrong answers and that the whole point of the exercises is to get your brain to actually think.

There was another exercise where you named a geographical location that did NOT end in the letter "A" and the next person named a place that begins with the last letter of the previous location.  Everybody had difficulty with that at one time or another, and though my mother had more problem than the others, I would see her working and enjoying it.

There were 3 other people in this class (plus Michael), 2 of whom do not live at Atria, but live in the community and come for the exercises.  They were so incredibly encouraging to my mother and told her over and over and over again how much it helps and how the important thing was to keep coming back because it works (sounds like an AA meeting!)

I had planned to stay for lunch and wait until Alice Nan came to visit.  She was in Sacramento and had not yet seen my mother's apartment, but during the class Walt called to let me know I had to make a change in a review I had written, so I didn't stay for lunch, but came home and went back later.  

It was very interesting to talk with my mother during the hour before Alice Nan arrived.  It was like she had slipped mentally back about 3 weeks.   It's hard to explain, but the things she didn't know about Atria are things she has known well for the last week or so.  I wondered if all that brain work had shaken things up in there and it all needed to settle down again.

She asked me four times where Alice Nan lived now and one of the first things she asked Alice Nan was where she was living now, but basically I think she enjoyed the visit.

While we were waiting for Alice Nan to arrive, she was looking at our "homeplay" (since Brain Gymnasium isn't school, Michael doesn't assign "homework" but "homeplay."  I loved the first one.

It's like a verbal sudoko, where you have to figure out how to get all the words into the blocks.  I saw immediately how to do it, [spoiler alert...in case you want to do this on your own] -- Once I noticed that "slow" and "went" were the only two words with the letter w in them, the whole thing fell into place instantly.  I wasn't going to show my mother how to do it, but I did explain that she should look for the letter that was in only two words.  It took her awhile to find it, but she did.  I told her she was right and explained about placing those two words and that would make it easy to put the other words in.

It wasn't three minutes before she picked it up again, as if she had never seen it before.  I tried explaining the whole "w" thing to her and she couldn't understand "letter" vs. "word."  When I told her to find the letter that was in only two words, she was pleased to find the rhyming pair "pent" and "went."  The whole exercise she had struggled to understand from 3 minutes before was just gone.

(I should add that the second exercise for us to do is something that totally defeats me.  It's along the lines of trains leaving stations at different times, or something like that.  No way can I figure it out, so my mother shouldn't feel bad that she's "so dumb" because on this exercise I'm just as dumb as she is!  I have been invited to be a regular member of the group, not just to accompany my mother!)

YOU work it out.  I'm stumped.

 I'm hoping she will make friends with the people in Brain Gymnasium so that when we are on our vacation, someone will remember to remind her about coming to class.  I have already made arrangements with Atria's General Director so that I can send e-mail for her to him each day and he will print it off and deliver it to her, which means that not only will she get a letter from me almost every day, but someone will actually check and make sure she's doing well while I'm away.  This is a huge worry off my mind.

I was at Atria almost the whole day today.  I picked up some KFC to bring home for dinner, while Walt was in San Francisco.  Tomorrow Walt and I are  going out to dinner to celebrate our anniversary a day late.