Alzheimer's Equals Fashion?

Also during the first few months,  the nurses insisted that mom have some new clothes, because her own were much too big (and they were, and had been for a long while). So we took her shopping to the mall. Since she had no idea how to use a credit card or bank card anymore, I had those in my possession.

At first, she wouldn't pick out things she liked because she continued to insist she didn't have any money. At the first shop, we picked out a few things for her and went to the cash and paid. She noticed me taking the cards out of my purse, and I guess she thought I was paying for the clothing.

Once she'd realized (or thought, anyways) that she didn't have to pay for them, she entered into the shopping with gusto.

She selected clothing she liked and most of the things she chose were really quite nice. It appeared that she had better fashion sense now than she'd ever had, picking out beautiful fabrics and clothing that fit her skinny frame without making her look like a scarecrow. We were pretty impressed.

She also selected a few pairs of very nice shoes - things my daughter or I would have worn, instead of her standard "old-lady-ugly-loafer" shoes. We nixed a couple of pairs with heels we figured wouldn't be safe, but on the whole, she did pretty well. That first big shopping trip replaced her entire wardrobe from the inside out, and ran pretty close to a thousand dollars. But, she was thrilled with the clothes, and from then on she was dressed like a fashion plate, every day.

These shopping trips continued throughout her stay at the nursing home, but none of them were as extensive as that first one. My daughter took her out once a week and monitored her purchases to things she knew mom could wear, and that were safe.

Oddly enough, we had a difficult time getting her to buy a new purse - that was one thing she didn't want to do, and continued carrying that old bag, even after we helped her pick out a nice new one.

Other outings included the hair dressers - to get a cut or set. She could have this done right in the nursing home, and sometimes did, but taking her out as often as we could seemed to help her feel like she had a more normal life, probably because the people were "normal", while the nursing home was mostly filled with others suffering from the same memory issues she was. She hadn't yet degenerated to the point where her surroundings didn't matter anymore.

We had to watch mom's clothes carefully, too. Fairly often we'd see some of mom's clothing on someone else, or notice things missing from the closet, like a pantsuit that had three pieces might be missing the pants, and once, her winter jacket was missing - that we found on a small man wandering the hallway.  Other more personal things would also go missing - undergarments for instance, and there were times when we found men's underwear in mom's drawers. That wasn't because she'd taken them, it was mostly because the laundry would be mixed up when being returned to the residents. Every piece of clothing in a nursing home is labelled with the name of the owner, but because there seemed to be a constant switch of  residents from one room to another, the laundry staff wasn't always aware of "quick switches", particularly when the nameplates on the doors weren't switched right away.

During mom's 2-year stay in the nursing home, she had been moved three times into different rooms, and once to a different floor. Moving is hard on alzheimer's sufferers. It's difficult to get used the "new", and once they are able to (if they still can) remember their room location, it isn't good to move them again, but out of necessity, it happened fairly often.