Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Irony and other funny things

So hooray for Psych. In the last week, my assignments have hit home, and it seems like everyone of them gets more and more difficult to discuss and talk about. First it was discuss Schizophrenia... Hmm, Andrew I wonder if your qualified to be able to speak on this topic? Of course I am, having an astranged uncle who has been happily paranoid schizophrenic for well over the course of my life. I remember when I was little, thinking how awesome it was that I had an artist as an uncle, and how funny it was when my uncle would do inpersonations of a notable celebrity. As the years past, what once was funny to me as a child, ironically was funny for another reason, because it was funny how what I once thought to be amusing and a good thing, turned out to be a monster, and not normal and very very wrong. Seeing my uncle not take his medication, and at the age of 16 , standing at 6'2 having to drop my uncle while he was going through one of his paranoid hallucinations, and that my grandparents were conspiring with the CIA to take his brain, and the only option was to silence my grandparents physically.

As I hit the submit button on my assignment, I was clueless to see that my next assignment was to write on how a family would cope with a family member with Alzheimers. My grandfather, a veteren of World War II, a titan of industry, capitalist , king of his domain and head of the household, become someone with a cognitive functioning level of a 6,11,15, or late 80 something year old - never knowing which one he'd be on any given day. It was last year when my grandfather, who already had begun showing signs of Alzheimers for many years, fell and broke his hip. little did anyone know that coming out of anesthetic he would not be the same man, and never be the same again. While most elderly patients come out of surgery without any side effects, as he's done with most of his life, my grandfather never took just the minimum, and always went all out, and he very much did the same in this instance. aside from the MERSA infection, he became the Paranoid delerious Alzheimer's patient who believed that the triad were out to get him in the hospital, and was positive that the rod which was now screwed into the bones to allow him to walk were melting, and he could feel the liquid titanium pooling in his heel. Speaking as a grandson, I could only try to come close to empathize with my grandmother - and through this event, my respect for my grandmother has never been greater, for her to see her husband, the man that she's loved for over 55 years, be reduced to someone, and something that isn't the same that she married those years ago.. yet love him just as much, and never once shows the obvious pain and dispair she must be going through, She has forever kept my admiration, respect and love. While I've gone through alot over the last 3 years, I only pray that I can make a difference for them, and help them whenever I can.

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