For Dementia Awareness Week
This week (from 17th – 23 May) in the UK it is Dementia Awareness Week.
Some of you will know that I worked for Alzheimer’s society until I retired a couple of years ago.
I would like to acknowledge the work of the society and to contribute to Dementia Awareness Week by posting ‘something different for me’: a short sketch each day called
“All in a days work”
These are not remembered stories but real events I wrote up a long time ago right after the visit/phone call.
As support workers we had excellent support in the office but on the rare occasion I couldn’t get there after I finished a visit or I was alone in the office I used to write down my thoughts and feelings and let the paper listen.
Yes it’s beautiful, but…
In the sitting room of the house I was in today, the couple had two lovely, soft, chocolate brown, leather settees that faced each other in perfect symmetry.
Each settee had three very pretty, quite large cushions on, beautifully placed, so inviting, so welcoming and homely and of course perfectly colour co-ordinated.
The lady of the house has dementia.
Every evening when she is anxious and unsettled she believes that the cushions are people, sitting, lounging on the settees, it unsettles her more.
It was difficult to talk to the couple about the possibility of taking the cushions off the settee in the evening.
I won’t have been successful of course.
