Alzheimer's

Guess I'll do one note on Alzheimer's. Actually, this is the dominating force in my life right now, taking care of ma, three-and-a-half days down home each week and then spending another day recovering from the exhaustion. I haven't put anything of this in the blog because it is personal and when I speak of a blog as "the public expression of private thoughts" I do not mean expression of private matters. But the blog is yet in development, I don't yet know what it's gong to become, so I guess I will make one entry, just to see how it feels. --This is something of a speculation about physiology anyway, so it's not fully personal.

Ma had a downturn last weekend.

Thursday night. She had been okay. We watched a rerun of All In the Family. Pleasantly enough, though there sure was a lot of shouting in that particular episode. A few minutes afterwards I asked her if she was ready to take her pills... And she shouted at me! Or perhaps an expression closer to exact would be that her tone was of an angry, aggressive snarl. That began a long night. I finally got to bed at 5:00 AM. It did occur to me midway through that night that perhaps ma took her cues from the TV, so no more Archie Bunker. But the anger, aggression, abuse, and vastly increased confusion continued throughout the weekend. I later made this speculation in my notebook:

The great change in ma was her abusiveness; the aggressive, the snide, the wounding remark... Actually, the abusiveness, the intensity of her anger, and the near unremittance of her confusion were all a change. I don't believe that after 10:00 PM that Thursday night she ever fully understood who dad and I were. The change was sudden. Earlier in the evening I don't remember noticing anything more than the ordinary dippiness.
I have speculated that that great anger coming just after she had been listening to Archie and Edith and continuing so forcefully for so many hours overwhelmed her already weakened brain and further damaged it, permanently, or at least for an extended time. The argument would be something like this: Too much norepinephrine causing excitotoxicity leading to appototic death of the cells, specifically to the cells that so long had kept her considerate. Physiologically this statement seems to have no meaning: Why would it be the "consideration" cells that were damaged by so much anger? This is how I explain it:

It seems reasonable to assume that a brain already damaged could be damaged more by violent emotion.
The progress of the disease is physical, as such, it is random in terms of the personality and would be random if damaged by anger.
But it does seem that it was the higher and more gentle functions that were damaged most.
It could be because thoughtfulness and consideration requires a great integration of function, because this is an achieved capacity, as distinguished from anger, which is a simple, more purely animal function.
So even if it were that the cell loss was random, still, within its random nature it would be integration that was lost, and thus with it the higher achievement of consideration.
The observational support for this argument is that now in all ways her capacities seem diminished, except in that of anger. But anger is the instinctual default. Anger may be possible even in a brain conceptually very nearly dead.

So much for my speculation. Since I go down again tomorrow I hope there's something within this argument that is not quite right.