Lewy What-y!?

You have to love doctors! They've often slotted important news into the middle of a sentence and you're left to say, "Sorry, what was that, can you please go back!"

In the middle of a routine visit with the elder care doctor, she made some comment to the effect of, "Well, with dementia patients... blah blah blah."

All I heard was the word "dementia". I mean, I had suspected it, how could you not! I didn't know there was a diagnose. I had come into dad's care part way through and was left to fumble my way through.

So in a routine visit with the neurologist, he casually inserted the phrase "Lewy body disease". Say what now? I had the doctor right it down on the back of a prescription form and looked it up online at home. Again, love the Internet!

Lewy body disease, or Dementia with Lewy Bodies (DLB) symptoms are dementia and hallucinations, along with other Parkinson's symptoms. It's best not to listen to me though, and read the description at Wikipedia.

I recalled back to when dad was first diagnosed with Parkinson's... we were told he had an aggressive form of the disease. Indeed, people often commented to me that dad didn't display typical Parkinson's symptoms. True, he had all the secondary symptom's, which I posted about in the previous post here... e didn't display many of the primary symptoms, however. His muscles never seized up on him, and apart from a slight tremor in his pinkie finger he didn't shake at all.

This is where it gets confusing for me. (Not that it takes much these days!) The neurologist informed us that Parkinson's can take many different routes (see note below), and for some Parkinson's patients, that can mean dementia, and Lewy body disease. However, some research online claims that Lewy body disease is a disease unto itself and overlaps symptoms with Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease. All I know is that my dad experiences visual hallucinations, along with the other symptoms of both Parkinson's and Lewy body disease... and that I cannot give him the full care he needs.

A word on the many different routes of Parkinson's disease: one thing that Parkinson's patients all have in common is that the disease effects every person completely differently. One patient might struggle with Bradykinesia, while the other might have fluidity of movement, yet suffer from hallucinations. I am not a proponent of support groups for myself. Firstly, the last thing I want to do after I get a break from the situation, is to go talk about it some more. I'd rather put my head down, get done what needs to be done, and then take some time out for myself. Also, from the beginning, we were on a need-to-know basis. Because of all the different symptoms of the disease, I didn't want to worry about one thing (rigidity), while completely missing another symptom that was bubbling under the surface (hallucinations). I'd rather deal with it as it comes.