The Caring Corner®
The Biggest Mistake We Make with Dementia Care
In over 10 years of working with hundreds of clients whose loved ones had dementia, I think one of the greatest challenges we face as caregivers stems from the fact that you can’t see their limitation.
Look at these two pictures… who has a disability? Well, certainly you might say that the man in the wheelchair might has some sort of disability…. after all, he’s in a wheelchair. You would not suggest that he go up or downstairs because you see that he has some sort of limitation.
Yet when our loved ones have dementia we ask them all the time to do things that they’re not capable of doing because we cannot see their disability. But if you could see inside their brains you would realize that there are real physical changes taking place.
Look at these diagrams of a brain without dementia and a brain with dementia. You can see that the brain with dementia is shrunken and atrophied … there are large gaps where brain matter used to exist.
And look at these PET scans. These are brains of living individuals … one without dementia, and one with dementia. The red indicates electrical activity… brain cells communicating with each other …. sending information and signals back and forth. You can see that in the brain of the person without dementia there’s a lot of this activity going on and in the brain of the person with dementia very little.
And with dementia, pretty consistently, it’s not just physical changes in your brain, you lose certain capabilities. There is a saying among dementia caregivers that you lose on the left and retain on the right.
Our left brains are responsible for logic, facts, words and our ability to control our behaviors. Our right brain is responsible for more qualitative capabilities like our ability to feel, to recognize images and symbols, and to take risks. You may have experienced this if you have ever gotten into a discussion with your mom or dad who has dementia…You start asking them to do things they’re not capable of
I’m going to tell you a story of an interaction I had with my mom who had dementia and for whom we cared for about five years before she passed. One night at dinner she made a comment that my birthday was on a date it wasn’t. I was born in November and she made a statement I was born in April. pretty funny, right? My mom didn’t know my birthday. So, this is where I did the wrong thing. I tried to correct her and we got into a bit of a back and forth. my mom was insisting it was April and I kept telling her it was November. So finally, with an air of authority, I pulled out my wallet and showed her my driver’s license. November and she looked at that and said well not according to my paperwork
You see what was going on here was she was losing her ability to deal with facts and logic, the way we must as functioning human beings. But her feelings were very much intact and she was annoyed and insulted that are smart aleck son was having a chuckle at her expense.
But, I had asked her to do something she simply was not able to do anymore. And, it doesn’t really matter, does it? Who cares when my birthday is?
So, when you’re interacting with your loved one think of these two individuals and remind yourself that there are real disabilities but we just don’t see them.
