As we were driving home from dinner last night, Kate said, “Everything looks so different to me.” I wasn’t sure if she just didn’t recognize what she was seeing or if she thought she was in some other place than Knoxville. It wasn’t long before I discovered she was mixing up Knoxville and Fort Worth.
When we drove up to our house, she said, “I remember this house.” I said, “It’s been a nice place for us to live.” That made me think she knew that we were home, but I wasn’t sure. After we were inside, she said, “I’ll follow you.” This is becoming a pattern. She is definitely unsure of herself in the house, that is, unsure of which room is which and where she should go. I told her to follow me and walked into our family room. She said, “It looks so different now.” I said, “So you think it’s changed.” She said, “Oh, yes.” Then she said, “This is a nice room.” She looked around the room as though it were a house we had lived in years ago and said, “This is a nice house.” I agreed with her.
Then she asked me what she should do. I told her she could relax in the family room for a while if she wanted and that we might watch a little of Fiddler on the Roof later. That seemed to suit her. She took a seat in the family room and picked up her iPad. I went to our bathroom to prepare her meds for the week ahead. When I returned with her evening meds, I found that she was not working on jigsaw puzzles but looking at photos. Recently, she has been accidentally touching the photo app as opposed to the puzzle app. She wasn’t unhappy about it, but she said she was trying to find photos of TCU. There weren’t any on her iPad.
I sat down with her and did a Google search for the photos she wanted. We looked at some of the recent ones. The she wanted to see old photos. I found a few of those as well. When we had finished, she said, “Sometimes I wish we had gone to school here.” I said, “Do you mean at TCU?” She said yes. It was then that I understood that she was confusing Knoxville with Fort Worth. She thought we were in Texas. I told her we had met at TCU. Then she said how glad she was about that. It wasn’t long after that when she said something about our living in this house. Once again, it seemed like she was responding to some aspects of her surroundings as though she was in Fort Worth and others as though she knew she was in Knoxville. This is another example of the kind of things that don’t make sense to someone who doesn’t have dementia but seems quite all right to a PWD. The best way I can think of it is to compare it to dreams we sometimes have. It is not unusual at all for contradictory or impossible things to happen in the dreams of normal people. This kind of experience seems to invade the world of PWDs.
There are moments, however, when I will say something that causes her to see that she has done something strange. This afternoon, for example, before we left for dinner, she had gotten an old Time magazine, a container of deodorant, a brass knick knack that looks like a business card holder, and a ceramic coaster to take with her. As she did the other night, she saw a picture of our son and asked about bringing it and a picture of her father with her. I asked where she thought we were going. Then she put the things down and said, “I can just leave them here.” This was said without any anger or disappointment. When this happens, it appears that she recognizes that she must be doing something wrong and stops.
Before going to bed, we had two other instances of her not being able to find me in the house. That wasn’t because I was in an unusual place. In fact, I heard her call me. “Richard, where are you?” I said, “I’m in the bedroom.” She didn’t come in. Then I heard her ask again. This time she found me. I think she had picked up the direction by the sound of my voice and not by knowing where the bedroom is. This kind of confusion is opening a whole new experience that I hadn’t really thought much about. I wonder how she will handle such things with the sitter. Kate may not want to ask her where she “should go” or do. I plan to let the sitter know that she is forgetting her way around the house.
