Snapshots of Dementia: Tom and the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Idea
Photo by William Hook on Unsplash Sometimes, dementia has a humorous side. Tom and I have a running joke about his “good ideas.” Part of him realizes he doesn’t always make the right choices, but not enough to keep him from making the next wrong choice. One dementia spouse described it this way: “The part of him that says, ‘That’s not a good idea’? That’s gone. If you’ve been following these posts, you may have noticed a few of these “good ideas,” some much more serious than others. Here are a few more: —One day, I came home to a horrible smell. He couldn’t tell me what had happened, but I quickly figured out that Tom had poured nearly a quart of gasoline down our kitchen sink. Our son had drained the gas from a scooter he was repairing, and Tom decided we needed to get rid of it. (Besides the judgment problem, this incident helped me realize he had lost his sense of smell, also courtesy of his disease.) —Another day, I came home to find scraps of one of my thin acrylic cutting boards in the trash. When he couldn’t find the pan he wanted, Tom had used the board as a baking pan for a can of cinnamon rolls. He knew something was wrong, but when I asked him about it, he couldn’t even name the “pan” he had used. (He also said the rolls tasted fine!) Just as with the gasoline, God’s grace prevented a fire. —One memorable evening found me typing away in my upstairs office when I heard a sound no one wants to hear: a scream, then a crash. I must have skipped several stairs in my hurry to reach a moaning Tom, now lying on the floor of our two-story great room. Determined to put up a new television antenna he’d received for Christmas, he had climbed to the top of our 12-foot ladder and stood on top. When he still couldn’t reach the window ledge where he hoped to place the antenna, he began to make his way back down and, as he said, “only” fell from the eight-foot level. The emergency room doctor was amazed that he ended up with no broken bones or other serious injuries. I was too. —Last August, while we were staying with our friends awaiting the sale of our home, Tom locked himself out of his cell phone, something that has happened multiple times before and since. Convinced it was broken, he wanted to visit the cell phone store. The problem? I was at work, and the friends we were staying with couldn’t take him to the store till later that afternoon. An adult...
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