In 1998, two-year-old Harrison Johnson was stung 432 times after disturbing a yellow jacket's nest while his Melbourne family was visiting friends in Tampa.
Harrison's parents asked neighborhood children and local church members to pray for him, but they did not call for… pic.twitter.com/i7fGHVVikd
One good thing about being an obsessive journal keeper since right around the time I graduated high school (and that those journals, started in WordPerfect, have now all been digitized and are completely searchable.)
So that’s how I know that the very first reference I made to my mom showing signs of dementia was in February 2018.
Like most people, I probably ignored those signs and chalked them up to “old age” or “forgetfulness” at first.
But knowing how my mom’s mom was at the end (don’t think it was ever diagnosed as dementia but clearly was) I think I knew deep down what it was when mom started getting names confused and repeating stories and just having the occasional “senior moment”.
There’s some irony that this first journal reference to her having signs of dementia was in February 2018 which is we did a family trip to the Moon Palace All-Inclusive Resort then, almost six years later to the day, we were once again Mexico and Shea and I once again arranged for mom to have a birthday surprise – her room decorated and a bottle of champagne waiting – although this time, it was a lot sadder as mom didn’t even know it was her birthday unless someone told her (but that also didn’t stop her from popping the champagne immediately – still my mom deep down!) 😉
Anyhow, I’ll have more posts about our recent Mexico trip including one I’d like to do about traveling with someone suffering from dementia as I didn’t find a lot of tips and think that some of what we learned during the week could be useful to others.
So glad the tour guide on this snorkeling tour didn’t actually need a bribe to make sure he didn’t drop our water camera when he swam underneath us to take this unique photo! 😉
