Cars & Ollie J-J

For those of you who don't know, I was in a car accident in the end of June. An old lady hit me from behind and totaled Rosie (that was the name of my old car). Now, I have to find a new car, and that is a serious challenge when I work so much. I've enlisted the help of my parents, since it was their car anyways. Now, my Dad is going to buy the car, and if I have enough money at the end of the summer, I'll buy it from him. If not, I'm not going to go back to school - I can't handle that again.

Moving on...I am still with Ollie today. For those of you who don't know about her, read here. Olive has started doing something new called tracking. Tracking is something that happens to people who do not have the mental capacity to accept their memory loss. You see, our brains are programmed to sort through the millions of messages that we receive through our senses every minute. Your brain filters out the things that it doesn't think that you need to consciously notice, and saves the rest for retrieval. With dementia, the brain can no longer sort through those messages anymore. Instead, it haphazardly attempts to rank them based on how many times they have come across your conscious mind and how important they were. So what does that mean for every day life? Well, Imagine a list with a hundred things on it. You would like to get through that whole list, but once you get past the first three things, you forget that you just did them, and now all that you can remember is that you have to finish the list, and you start over, frustrated that you haven't started yet. For Ollie, visual things that bother her get put at the top of the list, and it is extremely challenging to get her to move on to something else. So, she'll sit and have a conversation, and once she forgets what we were talking about (remember the list, she can't remember that she already did the top three things) the starts in at the top of the list again with the things that bother her. So we can be talking about how we are going to the doctor, and once she gets lost, she'll start getting angry about the carpet, or how her boy friend isn't here...etc. Well today, something about me bothered her, and so she started tracking things about me that she didn't like. It was really hard to hear all of the things that she was saying about the way that I looked (mostly because it was all true). But I am learning patience through working this summer. I have decided that this job with these people is such a blessing because I am now going to be the world's most patient, awesome mom. Haha - yeah, right.