Daddy's Emotional Roller Coaster

I’m a pretty content person most of the time. I let a lot of things go. I let a lot of things roll off. I try hard not to stress about things that don’t matter in the long run. Those are my typical days. Other days, though, I am a mess. An emotionally fragile mess. I can shatter at a comment that I deem as slightly critical, even if it wasn’t meant that way. On those days, anything short of obvious love and praise can send me spiraling downward. On those days, I can’t bend without breaking.

My dad used to make me laugh

Daddy wasn’t that way. He had a temper that could be riled easily, but he didn’t shatter. He was too strong for that. On a normal day, he was happy and goofy and boisterous. Some days, his whole purpose in life was making us laugh. I remember sitting in a doctor’s office when I was a kid. We were waiting. Imagine that. Having to wait in a doctor’s office. He got his fingers into a glass container of those long cotton swabs that were on the counter. With a little bit of quick work from his wannabe magician’s hands he made it appear to me that he was running a swab into his ear and out of his nose. Of course, that made me laugh and forget all worry, and, honestly, forget why I was at the doctor to begin with. That’s who he was. Anything for a laugh. Anything to try to make us happy.

Things changed after his brain hemorrhage

That wasn’t who he was after his brain hemorrhage and subsequent dementia diagnosis. A completely different man emerged. Besides the obvious language delays caused by aphasia, his mood was entirely foreign.

The hot-headed temper was there at times, but it was accompanied by something we’d rarely seen from him. Tears. I’d never really seen him cry before with the exception of when his mother died. After this, he cried all the time. He became the emotional wreck that I described before. He’d cry when we had to leave him. He’d reach for us and try to plead for us to stay with whatever words he could muster even though we couldn’t. He was an unwilling participant on an emotional roller coaster, and he dragged us all along for the ride.

I don’t really know how to separate the cause from the symptom or make sense of everything that was happening. I don’t know if anxiety and fear from everything that was happening caused the emotional breaks. I don’t know if the emotional breaks were symptoms of dementia, itself. I don’t know all of the “whys” of what happened, I only know that it did happen.

I think we anticipated physical deficits and language problems when we started wrapping our heads around the brain hemorrhage. We thought he may emerge not being able to use one side of his body or speak correctly or at all. We weren’t ready for the emotional ramifications of what was happening.

Bringing some of his old personality back

As hard as it was for us to witness, I know it had to be so much worse on him. To go from someone who was independent and generally content to someone who couldn’t even regulate his moods or even explain it in words had to be a nightmare. I guess living in a nightmare you can’t wake up from would be enough to break even the strongest of us.

After some pretty severe swings, we did manage to get Daddy admitted to a behavioral facility. Guys, I can’t begin to describe what a God-send that place was for us. They got his medicine and his mood regulated. He wasn’t back to normal in every sense of the word. They didn’t bring back his speech or all of his cognitive ability. But, they led us to a new normal that we could all live with.

He was happy to see us again, and he didn’t fall completely apart when we left. Much of his personality resurfaced. He was singing, and whistling, and making goofy faces again. He shook off that “emotionally fragile mess” costume he had grabbed from the back of my closet, and put “waiting room entertainer” back on. It was all part of the ride, but we were happy for the descent and the slow leveling of the track at the end.