Excerpt from the Alzheimer's Reading Room.
Here is what I learned, and what I learned to do.
- I couldn't leave my mother at home, not even for 15 minutes. So I had to take her with me every where, every time. Yes, this can be difficult and tedious. However, the choice of leaving her alone or having a miserable day was an easy choice. I chose the more difficult task of taking her with me over the emotional pain that I could expect if I didn't.
- I had to develop a daily routine to bring a sense of order and time to my mother's life. To the degree possible we tried to do that same exact things, in the same exact order, and at the nearly exact time each day. This really paid off big. My mother was always less confused after we added a consistent routine to our life.
- In the morning, I had my mother read to me the day and the date from the top of newspaper. This was designed to bring some order to our lives. I think it worked well. Don't you want to know the day and date? Don't you check this all the time? Well, my mother knew the day and date for about 87 years. I figured her brained was trained to need this information in order to function. So, I decided to supply this information to her brain every day.
- When my mother would say, I'm hungry, I'm starving, instead of correcting her and telling her she just ate, or couldn't possibly be hungry, I started looking her right in the eye, smiling, and then saying, okay give me a few minutes and then we will eat. Pretty simple solution, huh? It worked. And no, we didn't eat in a few minutes, instead she forgot she was hungry.
- Finally, I introduced Harvey the Repeat parrot into our lives. Harvey actually allowed me to throw the trash out, work on the Alzheimer's Reading Room blog, and go to the bathroom without my mother accusing me of being gone all day.
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Alzheimer's | Dementia | Patients Lose Their Sense of Time
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