Dementia + Ad-libs = Laughs!
May 19, 2023
When I worked in the healthcare system, I used to do a lot of cognitive assessments with my patients with dementia, and one of the questions on many of those assessments was "write me a sentence. Any sentence you want, just as long as it's a complete sentence."
As you can imagine, I got a lot of *interesting* results over the years. Sometimes I would get a single word like "hello", other times just a dot or a scribble on the page. There were a lot of "I want to go home"s, which always broke my heart a little, and a lot of "I love you"s, which always swelled my heart a little. Once, a man wrote me an entire paragraph about how his much-admired friend, Greg, helped him get to the hospital that was a single, 15-line run-on sentence. TWO different times, I asked this question and was treated to a spontaneous recitation of original poetry. But maybe my favorite ever was when a very gentle Polish man decided that was the moment he would sing me the national anthem of his homeland. The occupational therapy student who was shadowing me at the time could barely contain her joy.
Anyway, I mostly just wanted to share these stories because I was reminded of them when I saw this Instagram post about a daughter creating funny ad-libs with her mother (swipe left to see the second page of the post):
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And also because I just love finding those small moments to tease a little humor and happiness out of dementia. It's okay to find humor and joy in dementia! Just because dementia is tough for everyone doesn't mean it all has to be tough. Don't be afraid to appreciate the funny moments to help you get through the hard ones.