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Since this IS a blog about life with an early-onset dementia patient, I could do something really different and talk about my life with my very own early-onset dementia patient.

Because, let me tell you – it doesn’t get any easier. Not at all.

One night last week, M mentioned to me that the bath mat in his bathroom (the hall bath) was wet and he didn’t know why. Of course, my “uh oh” alarm went off, and I went to investigate.

The bath mat in front of the sink wasn’t just wet – it was completely soaked through. I opened the cabinet under the sink and it was filled with water – and had been for so long that everything in there was covered with mold.

I looked at M and said “Don’t you open this cabinet every day to get your shaving things?” He said, “Yes, I wondered what was going on with that.”

Great.

I didn’t try to save anything from under the sink – it all went in a trash bag. Then I asked M to get me some towels to start mopping up some of the water. The towels were in the bathroom closet, about two feet from where I was sitting on the bathroom floor, but with my knee still giving me trouble, getting up and down is an issue.

M started to walk downstairs to the laundry room for towels.

I called him back into the bathroom and directed him to the closet. He reached in and handed me a roll of toilet paper.

“No, I need towels.”

Then he handed me a wash cloth.

Closer, but still not enough to do the job. I finally got up and got the towels myself.

Later, when tempers had cooled and M and I were talking about it, I told him that the next time he was in the shower and needed a towel, I was going to bring him a roll of toilet paper. He got a good laugh over that.

We had a plumber come out Friday and take care of the leak that had caused all the problems to begin with. Now the doors to the cabinet have swelled, at the bottom, to almost double their original size. So there’s another problem to take care of.

But, as I told M, no one is dead. No one was injured. It can all be repaired.

But it’s always something!