Immediately after posting "Watching Dementia," I hopped in my car and drove over to the memory care facility to visit my friend there. The person I met today was someone completely different from yesterday.
My friend usually talks quite a bit, but he just rambles. He speaks in complete sentences (not "word salad"), but he will be incoherent. He may seem to have something on his mind, but one sentence does not logically follow from the previous, and he does not express specific ideas.
Yesterday, he seemed depressed, but there was one theme in his speech he could follow -- uncertain he was about who he was and where he was. He could also talk about how frightened he was. He said he didn't know who I was.
Today, he recognized me and spoke as coherently as I've ever heard him. Perhaps more coherently. He stuck with a topic and actually reasoned about it at length. I can't say I've ever heard him reason about a topic before.
Many caregivers that I've met speak about how people with dementia have good days and bad days. I've experienced this to a lesser extent with my own condition. I'm wondering if there's something in this phenomenon that might be useful to study, but I haven't seen anything about it in the research literature.
In my book, "Beating the Dementia Monster," I describe what has occurred since 2015 when I first knew I had memory problems. (You can find it on Amazon.com.) I have experienced remarkable improvement, and I’m certain that I can share valuable information with many others. In this second edition I continue my story to 2020 and provide greater understanding of how Alzheimer's advances and why what I did worked.
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