Blogging grows light and occasional

I'm headed for San Antonio, tomorrow, so will be doing little blogging for the next month or so.  My only contact with internet service will come from Starbuck's and occasional forays to North Star Mall.  I do not look forward to this.  They're talking about transferring mom to a rehab facility, tomorrow (which I'm hoping will be postponed a day), and one of her doctors has decided she's got dementia, which strikes me as odd.

I used to call mom every Sunday to see how she's doing and she's always been fine.  Then I'd been speaking with her 1-2 times a week since she got out of that "rehab center" she was in (the one that hires high school kids to help with patients) and she was consistently lucid.  Tired a lot and weak, but if she was rested she and I could talk for an hour, easily, and she never did not make sense.  We'd even disagree on politics and this political-religious zealot she follows so avidly (who shall remain nameless), so this idea of her going senile all of a sudden makes no sense to me...unless it was brought on by her illness.  Which I guess is possible.

To be fair, dementia does run in my family, on my mother's mother's side.  My great-grandmother Cora suffered from it, as did great-granduncle Jesse.  And it's known to skip generations.  So the DNA is there.  However, on my mother's father's side, the family tends to live into their 90s and be sharp as a tack till the end.  My great-grandmother Marie in Albert Lea, MN used to cut out stories from "Reader's Digest" and various other magazines then hand-make books with them to send me on my birthday and at Christmas.  She'd have lived to be a hundred if she hadn't slipped on some ice and broken her hip.  She died at 95.

So I don't know.  It's just, I'd always thought that indications of dementia show up and that it advances slowly.  Yet I saw no changes like that in any of my visits home; just her age catching up to her very quickly.  But I may be misunderstanding what my brother's telling me...or he may be misunderstanding the doctor.  I'll find out tomorrow, I hope.

This also means I'll have little time to do any writing, so I sent the last, best draft of LD off to the publisher.  This way, if things do get crazy, LD will be ready to go.   I wound up with over 62,000 words, to my shock...and also discovered that Microsoft Word's grammar checking system cannot figure out the proper use of "whose" as opposed to "who's".  TWICE it wanted me to change to the incorrect usage.  "Strunk & White" would roll over in their graves.

Now off to pack.  I'm taking two suitcases, a box and a satchel.  Good thing Southwest lets you check 2 bags for free.