Taking out the trash

[Poppygail]

A line I placed in my last post got me to thinking about my typical thought process currently. I had said something to the effect of, “if your dementia patient stands in the doorway blankly staring...” I began to think this would be just a small part of the thought process I was going through at at the time. For example, if I were to decide I needed to take out the trash the sequence of events would go something like this:

1. I need to take the garbage to the curb.

2. Get up from chair, walk toward kitchen.

3. Brush leg on edge of coffee table as I walk by and notice a butterfly trinket box I made for my wife’s birthday several years ago.

4. Pick up said box, try to remember why I made it, marvel at it’s intricacy (modest, aren’t I), wonder if I have anymore of this Bloodwood and head toward my shop to see.

5. On my way I notice my wife pouring herself a cup of coffee and decide that would be just what I need as well.

6. Pour my coffee, put the lid on (that’s often one of dementia’s advantages, sleep deprivation so you fall asleep without warning and spill your coffee. The remedy- an adult sippy cup) and go on with what I was doing.

7. Now, just what was I doing?

8. Oh yes, I was going to take my morning meds, so off I go.

9. Meds taken. Check. Where was I going from here? Aha, I was taking out the garbage.

10. Arrive in the kitchen. Now why am I here? There’s my coffee I just poured, that must be why I came in here.

11. Pick up my coffee and go back to my recliner.

12. Drink coffee and keep thinking there’s something I should be doing.

13. As this thought puzzles me another one crosses my mind! “I wonder if anyone has thought to take out the trash today? Maybe I should do that now.....”

In other words, the entire process was nothing more than, SQUIRREL!!

While this can be incredibly frustrating it’s also hilarious to sit back and think about the insanity of it all. Life’s never dull.

[jeffcobb Ambassador]

Randy; totally get that one too; in many ways our dementias are these weird mirror copies of each other. I have tried to describe this exact scenario before and failed miserably every time.

Long, long ago in a world far, far away (1960's America) there was a comic strip in the Sunday papers called The Family Circus that went on for like 30 years. There was one cartoon I recall where Jeffie (no shit) the kid was explaining to his mom that he came right home but the picture shows his path from school to home and its the knottiest thing you have ever seen, funny as hell though. At least so long as you weren't waiting for Jeffie to bring you some medicine.

As a total side thing, as my speech abilities are decaying daily I am looking at alternative methods of communication, and its here that I find there is nothing in existence yet. What I wish I had available (well, everyone would) as say an off-shoot of Google::Images is a way of doing a contextual search on images, so if I said "find me all the pictures with hot dogs and french fries", it would be smart enough to look through its vast image store for pictures with hot dogs and french fries in them, even if they are not the main focus of the picture. But I digress....

I have described executive function problems to others as the worst case of ADD you can imagine. Its almost ridiculously easy to get distracted, and combine that with a crappy memory and you are set up to completely bail on something you really wanted/needed for something that caught your eye/ear...and the worst thing is, this is likely a pivot in your day, not a side-task that will allow you to resume to original task when done. For each level "deep" you get distracted, the odds of you even recalling let alone completing the original task drop even more.

To explain, say I go to make coffee, but get distracted by Beth asking me a question on the way out to the kitchen...and the question Beth asks requires looking up the answer someplace. If its just on a local computer, odds are about 50/50 I will do what I went there for....or I will get distracted by something totally new like hitting The Pirate Bay...as of this instant, the original task is gone as if it never existed. There is a whole lot of computer science logic about this whole scenario because its one of the more fundamental tasks PCs have been doing for 50 years; its called "unwinding the stack", meaning all of the distractions are discarded to concentrate on the primary or original task at-hand.

I know this sounds dorky Randy but the only thing I have found that keeps me even remotely on-task is the light in the hat trick. Even with just a flashlight, you will be forced to set it down to complete whatever task you got distracted by and in my experience, you are faced with the idea of bailing on the first task while its still fresh enough in your mind/memory that you won't want to do it and you resume the first task. Thats how it works with me anyhow...