He CAN Drink Beer!

Sometimes I am a little slow at thinking. He hasn’t been drinking beer because it reacts with his medication and makes him sleepy. I have been concentrating on the alcohol part of the drink instead of just the drink. They do make non-alcoholic beer and he would never know the difference. YEAH!!!!

And that is exactly what we have gotten him. Non-alcoholic beer is the greatest thing ever made. He can’t drink out of the can anymore. He covers the hole with his lips and only gets little sips; so we stuck a straw in the can. At first, he said he couldn’t drink beer with a straw, and I told him to give it a try anyways. He tied and said that it worked great and wondered why no one else drinks beer that way. I told him because they never thought of it.

He has taken a slight turn downward again. I was hoping he had stabilized, but that isn’t the case. I am so glad his niece Lesa helped me go through his closet when she was here. We removed most of his clothes. Thursday, we went to see “The Glass Menagerie”. He was concerned he would miss getting ready and we would not take him to the play, so when Rob left for work at 6:00 he got up and tried to get dressed.

He pulled most of his shirts out of his closet and tired to put them on. This was not easy since he has a very hard time with buttons and hanging clothes up. His closet was a mess, and the shirt he finally picked was a summer floral short sleeved shirt. At least he tried. Although, he had gotten himself so worked up over dressing, and he kept telling me over and over how sorry he was. Not a big deal, I rehung the clothes, and thank goodness there weren’t a whole lot of them. I then picked an appropriate shirt for him to change into.

Once he was dressed we went to the play and he had a great time. After the play I took him out for lunch. I ordered him a ham and cheese sub with chips. He couldn’t figure out how to eat the sub. Sarah and I told him it was a sandwich and to eat it with his hands. He finally picked it up and took a bite from the center of the sub. Sarah and I laughed.

The sub fell apart and he wound up eating it with a knife and fork. That worked until he just had the bread left and he kept trying to cut the toasted bread. That wasn’t working very well so I finally had to tell him to put the knife and fork down and finish the bread off with his hands. Well, that resulted in him throwing his knife and fork down, pushing his plate aside and pouting.

The best way for me to describe what is happening to him is to ask you to think back in time when you were learning math. Sometimes, you would get a math problem that you could just not figure out. You would finally get the answer key and find the answer to the problem and you would know that the answer was correct, but could not figure out the steps it took to reach that answer. If you can remember that far back, I am sure you can remember being very frustrated looking at that problem, going over the steps one by one with them still making no sense at all. Finally, if you were lucky you had a teacher or friend show you the process and a light bulb would go off in your head and suddenly everything would be clear.

Bob never gets to that light blub anymore. He knows the problem, he knows the answer, he can’t figure out the steps in order to get to the answer. It is very frustrating for him. And many times now he just wants to walk away and throw everything down. He asks me, “Why can’t I button my shirts?” I tell him it is because that part of his brain doesn’t work the same way anymore. Just like he can’t tie his shoes, he also can’t button shirts all the time. What is frustrating for him is that he knows that the shirt needs to be buttoned, but he can’t figure out how to do it.

Simple tasks like this will be harder and harder for Bob to achieve and this will result in more and more frustration. What we must do is become good teachers and friends and constantly come up with ideas to make his life easier and less frustrating. Just like the non-alcoholic beer was a simple solution to allow him to drink more and enjoy doing it.

Well for those of you who still celebrate Halloween have a safe and fun time. For those of you who don’t celebrate this holiday, stay at home and fret over the upcoming election. It will give you the same results as all the others out there being scared by fake monsters.

Give him a call this week end and ask him about the play he saw. He would love to drink a beer while telling you all about it.