Day to Day Frustrations

August 2, 2014

I was looking forward to a good day today.  I did some heavy house cleaning yesterday, so I planned on a relaxing Saturday.  I sat down with the newspaper and my first cup of coffee.  I first became distressed when I attempted to complete the daily Sudoku puzzle.  I am a fairly  intelligent person and have always loved playing with numbers and prior to my diagnosis of FTD, was employed as an accountant.  So when,  lately, I began having difficulty completing the Sudoku puzzles, I became frustrated, and this morning was no exception... couldn't do it again.  I should take a moment here to mention that with fronto-temporal lobe dementias, the executive functioning of the brain is the first to suffer.  This makes it difficult to reason things through, come up with solutions or to learn new tasks.

My next task related to the newspaper, was programming the DirecTV system to record any shows that are not already set up to record each week.  This usually includes any specials and the daily Pittsburgh Pirates games.  I have been a life-long fan of the Pirates and my husband, who  is originally from Illinois and a Cubs fan, has learned that it's much more enjoyable to be a Pirates fan, so we record all the games to make sure we don't miss them.  When I started going through the schedule, the games were already set to record, which meant my husband had already done it.  I became extremely agitated because I took this to mean that either I had screwed up the recordings last week, or for some other reason, he no longer thought I was capable of doing the job.  Of course, this turned out not to be true.  He was just setting up some auto races to be recorded and went ahead and did the baseball as well.  But, by then, the agitation was settled in too deep to shake it off.

I wasted more than a couple hours stewing about it.  I did, finally, come up with some conclusions that will be interesting to discuss with my therapist next week.  I realized that my greatest accomplishments these days are that I can still take care of the house and am still a pretty excellent cook.  Excuse the bragging on the cooking part, but I am.  But these are pretty mundane tasks and not very intellectually stimulating.  Of course, neither is programming the DVR, but it was something I was used to doing every Saturday morning. I have always used my intellect in the different jobs I have had through the years and, in addition, I was always a creative and talented person.  Used to be, when I would be feeling badly about anything, I would go to my craft room and create something, or paint something.  But, I can't do those things anymore.  I am so very fortunate to have an extremely supportive husband who is usually able to help me during these times when I am giving up on myself.  I ended up doing a couple things around the house that I have been putting off for a couple years which helped almost as much as creating something.  Then I went out on the deck, read part of a book and watched the wildlife.  At least the end result was a relaxing second half of a Saturday.