But I'm not convinced. Nor am I doctor, but something just doesn't add up. Maybe it's the way my mother always has to shroud everything in secrecy like it's a crime to be made aware of my grandmother's diagnosis. I have a right to know. She took care of me since I was a baby and I've been a regular at her home for the last twenty years. I think they're just slapping a diagnosis on her and hoping no one will ask anymore questions.

My grandmother's life entered a free fall shortly following the "stroke" she suffered. I say stroke with uncertainty because just a few weeks ago the doctors, the nursers, the strangers running the hospital questioned if she really had a stroke at all. I'm a bit confused. Is my grandmother some kind of alien life form? Shouldn't it be less than impossible to determine whether or not she had a stroke? Perhaps they figure that since she's old it doesn't really matter what she has, as long as they can tuck her away somewhere and she's not peeing herself. Well I'd like to know, I'd like to know so that when I look her in the eyes I can savor the moments she recognizes me because there might not be any more of those. When I asked my mother what she had, she hopped and skipped from one disease to another. She had Alzheimer's for sure. She was demented. But she was depressed. But then she had a stroke, which was the reason she couldn't walk. But wait, the reason she couldn't walk was because they had her so full of drugs because she was combative. So which is it? Some of these? All of these? None? I feel rather shortchanged. Don't we deserve a concrete diagnosis? I've been doing some research on Alzheimer's on my own time, and I'm honestly just not convinced. She has a few of the symptoms but it just seems to me that there's a giant jagged piece of this puzzle missing.

My mother and aunt have always said that my grandmother was never an easy person to deal with. She has always been stubborn and combative. Does that mean she's had dementia all her life? I'm beginning to discover something about myself: I get feelings about these things. Last year I accidentally discovered that my grandmother was an alcoholic when I went to visit her. It wasn't really an accident, it was more like I just sensed it, I just knew it. I told my mother and sure enough she had been drinking three gallons of wine a week all by herself. It was nothing new, either; my late grandfather had always warned my grandmother to be careful. After her so-called stroke she was brought to the hospital where she had to be given a high dose of sedative because she kept screaming at the top of her lungs. Since the first sedative had failed she was switched to a more potent one, which was very unusual because most patients respond to the first one. While we were waiting (for almost an hour) for a nurse to come by, I got to thinking that the reason she's so abrasive is because she's going through withdrawal and because she's so used to alcohol, which depresses the nervous system and probably acts like a sedative, it wouldn't be out of the question to say she's built up a tolerance against these sorts of drugs. I said this to the nurse when she finally came by and she brushed it off, but when the representative from a nursing home stopped by she told my mother the same exact thing. Then my mother told me I should be a doctor and we went home.

I feel as though something is amiss here. Maybe she really does have Alzheimer's and I'm just delusional, or maybe there's something that everyone keeps missing. It's pretty easy to slap her with dementia and use it to explain away all her eccentricities. Yet I think there's more digging to be done. When I see her, I see a flicker of life that is longing to come bursting through the gray hair and wrinkled eyelids. I feel something under there, waiting for justice to be done. I don't think it's over yet.