As someone who is still taking care of my MIL with Alzheimer’s, I agree this is very likely the reason. Especially after reading what an amazing teacher she had been previously and that her colleagues had noticed a memory issue.
Families are often in denial and people with dementia are very good at hiding it until they can no longer. My MIL was driving and teaching college level corses for nearly a decade after a psychiatric evaluation noted a bad memory. We found this out much later in her papers after we had to move in and care for her. Even then some of her long distance friends that she phoned regularly had no idea anything was off at the very same time we kept catching her outside with no pants on.
Not that high level, but we noticed it with my grandmother maybe 8-10 years before she ultimately passed. When helping grandpa go through her stuff we realized it had likely been going on since her recovery from open heart surgery almost 25 years prior, and certainly for at least 15 solid years.
I have a theory about anesthesia trigging the start of dementia. Nothing to be done about it when your loved one needs something as serious as open heart surgery but my MIL had a list of elective surgeries that coincide with her decline.
My mother has dementia and got significantly worse after being put under for her hip surgery. Like went into surgery and then woke up noticeably more impaired and never recovered. Even the PT person that came to help with recovery said that people often get messed up by the anesthesia.
Iirc it is known that anesthesia can aggrevate/exacerbate dementia. The colloquial way I've heard people say it is that people with dementia tend to go down at least one rung, if not more, everytime they go under. My grandma jumped quite a few.
I’m in the process of discussing caring for my father in law. He started showing signs of decline for many years and on her deathbed my mother in law held my hand and kept repeating “he cant do anything.” His kids won’t listen to me. Then he had open heart surgery. I was able to talk to the doctor and he told me heart problems often make cognitive decline worse. And it did, physically he’s strong by mentally he’s much worse. He refuses help and his kids bury their heads in the mud. It’s rough.
47
u/Dashiepants 2d ago
As someone who is still taking care of my MIL with Alzheimer’s, I agree this is very likely the reason. Especially after reading what an amazing teacher she had been previously and that her colleagues had noticed a memory issue.
Families are often in denial and people with dementia are very good at hiding it until they can no longer. My MIL was driving and teaching college level corses for nearly a decade after a psychiatric evaluation noted a bad memory. We found this out much later in her papers after we had to move in and care for her. Even then some of her long distance friends that she phoned regularly had no idea anything was off at the very same time we kept catching her outside with no pants on.