Before you blame dementia, shuffle a mile in these slippers
You misplaced your keys. You can't recall your neighbor's name. You lost your credit card. You accidentally blew off the dentist's appointment that's been on your calendar for a month. You can't remember the word for that kitchen gadget you need. You spend five minutes looking for your reading glasses before finding them perched on top of your head.
"Man, I must have Alzheimer's," you say.
You do not have Alzheimer's disease.
I come to this amateur diagnosis while I am shuffling around a room at Arden Courts Alzheimer's Assisted Living facility in Elk Grove Village wondering what in the world I am going to do with these dishes in my hands, fearing that I'll never be able to thread a belt through the loops of the pants I still haven't found and worried that I didn't match any of those pairs of socks on the bed.
"We had a lot of mismatched socks," confirms Robin Pecak, senior marketing director at Arden Courts of Elk Grove. And they aren't all mine.
The three dozen health-care professionals and family caregivers taking part in "The Virtual Dementia Tour!" all have problems completing our five assigned tasks, says the program's leader, Nicole Bartecki, manager of market development for Arden Courts.
The award-winning virtual dementia tour simulates the problems faced by people with Alzheimer's or dementia.
To replicate the sensory problems people with Alzheimer's develop, I am wearing latex gloves with dried split peas in the fingertips, making it difficult to do tasks requiring fine motor skills. Some fingers are taped together to simulate arthritis. Since people with Alzheimer's generally have vision problems, the room is darker than I need to see well. Goggles give my vision a yellow tint and have a black dot in the middle to mimic a symptom of macular degeneration.
The white strobe light in a corner doesn't distract me, and neither do the headphones pumping a muted, garbled conversation into my ears. I have three active boys at home, and have written many stories back in the day when newsrooms offered a smoke-filled cacophony of yelling, swearing and phone conversations. But I attempt only three of my five tasks in the allotted time, and do them all poorly.
I'm frustrated, sad, angry and confused.
"You had these issues for three minutes. Imagine living with it daily," Bartecki says.
A few minutes of shuffling around in the slippers of a person with dementia gives the rest of us a new understanding.
"We had one family caregiver who became very emotional about it. He felt terrible about himself," Pecak says.
"We get a lot of tears," Bartecki says. "They get a lot of guilt, the guilt of not being patient enough."
That stress takes its toll on family members who serve as caregivers for people with dementia.
"If you are a strained caregiver, you are 63 percent more likely to die (within the next four years) than someone who is not a caregiver," says Caryn D. Etkin, project manager for a study at the College of Nursing at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago that aims to promote the health of family caregivers. To find out more about the yearlong study, please call Etkin at (312) 942-5242.
In Monday's virtual dementia training for professionals, "we talked about how to change our behaviors rather than changing our residents," Bartecki says.
That's a realization that hits home with my training partner, Lisa Marchetta, sales manager for Alexian Village, an Elk Grove Village supportive-living community for seniors. She struggles with her tasks as much as I do, but she gains insight into what directions would help people with dementia.
"You can tell them to put on their sweater, but they might not be able to remember where their sweater is," Marchetta says after training. "So tell them it is in the closet. And then tell them where the closet is."