Booze and Words

This past week has been, well, challenging. As you know, Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD) can cause a lot of out of character, odd behavior. My husband has turned into a binge alcoholic. When we started dating over 20 years ago, the man did not drink at all. He said it turned his stomach. Well, I guess in a way it still does because he will drink until he vomits. Last weekend was a nightmare. He was drinking whiskey, his drink of choice now, 24/7 for 4 days. He yelled at me, was rude to me, wanted a divorce, accused me of "ulterior motives", stared at me for long periods of time and said he wanted me uncomfortable, called me a bitch over some perceived slight, was loud and obnoxious and in my face, kept saying that I "better get things straight" and "not going to discuss it with you, end of story" over what I have no idea because he "wouldn't discuss it", and was generally just angry and irritated. 

After his whiskey supply dwindled, he slowly came back around out of this alcohol induced rage. This is when it was decided that he can no longer have any alcohol as it is making a very hard situation even worse. Not sure how we are going to accomplish this, but it needs to work. My theory is this - that the brain is shrinking which causes inhibition, apathy, paranoia, confusion, memory loss, etc., and add the alcohol which also causes inhibition, confusion, etc. and it's like there is no brain functioning in there. So think of an angry drunk x10 and the poor FTD patient has no control over this. Not to mention, he rarely eats while drinking this much. I cannot imagine the effects on the body, let alone the brain, are very good. Plus, his meds are not as effective when combined with such alcohol excess.

I've also noticed that my husband is having a harder time with words. He's also speaking less and wanting to leave the house less. In fact, we went to run an errand today (his errand) and I wanted to stop at Walmart after. We stopped and after about 10 minutes of shopping he was ready to go. When he was well, he wanted to go go go, always to the mall, to look at new homes, to go to a fair or festival, camping, anything. Oh, and he has been shuffling his feet a lot. This is something new I have noticed. Anyway, back to the words. I asked him today what that spot between the lanes on the highway was and he thought for a minute and said "the meridian". This is one I have been noticing he uses incorrectly lately. I said oh, it's the median. He looked at me very confused and said "that's a word? I'm pretty sure it's meridian". I found this particularly odd as my husband has always been very much into astronomy and the term meridian is used to describe when the sun passes a point on the Earth at noon. He was familiar with the use of the word and would know the median is not the meridian.

Another word problem I noticed today was on our stop at Walmart. He was looking at the bags of Chex Mix and reading the flavors. The blue bag says "traditional" and "savory". He looked at me, with a very confused look, and asked "what does savory mean"? I answered that it meant that bag of mix wasn't sweet, and instead was more of a salty flavor. He replied "oh I see, it has no flavor". I then went further to explain that it had flavor other than just salt and it was much like a cookie (sweet) vs. popcorn (savory). He honestly could not recall the word savory. This has got to be frustrating for him.