Outside and out of her mind!
You know that feeling when you return from a long trip where you feel like you have to kind of acclimate to your routine and your surroundings? That is what today is. The only thing is that I did not go on a trip. I was at home all day and still I feel a little bit like I need to get situated. The reason for that is a bit of a family crisis. My Grandmother had another one of her dementia episodes though she has never been formerly diagnosed as dementia. In reality it is really more like a series of strokes that she has that directly affect her mental state and overall physical self in a very dramatic way. She is so far off of her rocker that you would swear that her rocker was hauled off to the dump without her say-so and she has now gone in search of it. It starts out with a minor shift in her usual routine. She become much more talkative and awake than normal and she appears as though she is actually more aware of her surroundings than usual; but only relative to what we know and expect from her. My Grandmother is almost completely blind due to the ravages of Glaucoma. She has a minuscule amount of sight in her left eye but as far as we can tell she can only make out shapes and light and occasionally the number on a large print playing card. Grandma is also mostly deaf so as you can tell we are dealing with a 97 year old Helen Keller but in this case she was not deaf and blind from early childhood. The part of this that makes it all so hard is her stubborn will and the fact that she is heavily in denial about being blind. She began to lose the sight in her right eye in 2007 but Glaucoma is a progressive disease, which steals your sight over time. So by 2009 she had become completely blind and therefore she'd had time to adjust, in a way. In reality she drew further into denial and when she has one of these episodes it is very apparent that she is totally unaware that the people and things that she believes she is "seeing" are not real.
The first time that my Grandmother had and episode of confusion and hallucinations I turned to WebMD in hope of finding some answers. (Because if it is on the Internet it must be true, right?) I conducted a search on that website using the key terms: "Hallucinations and Vision Loss" and after weeding through the articles that only pertained to the first part of that phrase which dealt solely with drug use I found an article about a unique phenomenon called: "Charles Bonnet Syndrome". This article (as it said in the title) was "Damn Interesting" especially to anyone who has ever dealt with what my family has witnessed from my Grandmother. The syndrome, whose origins date back to the year 1760, refers to a scientist and his father's vivid hallucinations. Charles Bonnet had begun to lose his sight and in the first year to year and a half occasionally fell victim to his over active imagination. In essence, his failing eyes began to play tricks on him and he was plagued by the crazy visions he was having as a result. The disorder or syndrome is said to affect about 15% percent of those with significant vision loss but it could be even more common than that. The hallmark of this syndrome is that often times the hallucinations are so out of the ordinary that most who suffer from it know that what they are seeing is not real and are therefore not fooled by it. However, in the case of my Grandmother because she is so unreachable it is next to impossible to convince her that she is not really seeing what she thinks that she sees. Ad to that the fact that she is immensely proud it is likely that she would never want to admit what she is going through. So in her mind, "Of course she is seeing: "that man over there with the two little girls." Or she must be outside because why else is she seeing all of those houses and people milling about." We have yet to find a way to bridge the gap between where she is and reality. All that we can do is contain her, keep her safe and try to anticipate potential hazards before they occur.
Obviously, I cannot diagnose my Grandmother and decide that this is in fact the condition that she suffers from but I can say most of what I read in the article applies to her situation. But, I must also keep in mind that there can often be more than one answer to the same problem. However, in this instance the problem of my Grandmother's hallucinations is exacerbated by the fact that she cannot hear and therefore cannot be reached. We must repeat everything that we say and a lot gets lost in the translation; which only further complicates matters. The article mentions the idea that dreams play a major role in the visions. Because of a lack of visual stimuli from the eyes the brain must then create this stimuli and perhaps the same mechanism that creates our dreams while we are asleep works overtime when a newly blind person is awake as a way of providing that stimuli.
My theory is that when a sighted person wakes up from a dream (especially a particularly bad dream) there is that instant separation between our waking world and the dream world. Typically there is always something that is a little bit off in a dream and therefore we are instantly able to recognize it for what it is. However, with my Gram she was robbed of this ability when she lost her sight and so she and any other person who’s lost their sight may stay "stuck" in the dream world a little bit longer than normal. The mind is a fascinating device and I don't believe that we as allegedly sophisticated animals has even come close to scratching the surface of it endless capabilities.
