Finding the Words

One of the strangest effects of Mom's dementia is aphasia.  She has a huge vocabulary and has always been well-spoken.  Now she's having a lot of trouble expressing herself.

Aphasia is all over the news lately.  Action star Bruce Willis has dementia-related aphasia, retiring from acting last year because he couldn't really do the words anymore.  A decade or more ago, the "hip" disease was Parkinson's, thanks to Michael J. Fox who was diagnosed as a relatively young man.  Aphasia is getting the same sort of attention now, but a lot of people have no idea what it actually is:

Aphasia is caused by damage to the language-dominant side of the brain, usually the left side, and may be brought on by:

• Stroke
• Head injury
• Brain tumor
• Infection
• Dementia

It is currently unknown if aphasia causes the complete loss of language structure, or if it causes difficulties in how language is accessed and used.

Brain Damage.  That is the cause.  It's scary to think about because our brains are our most precious organ - it is what makes us US.  When you have brain damage, the essence of you is disintegrating.  That's what makes this so sad, seeing my mother slipping away a little more each day.  It's alarming how fast this is happening.

At first it was a word here and there that she couldn't quite manage.  On the tip of her tongue, but never to come.  Everyone does this at one time or another, so it's an easy sign to miss.  When she realized she was losing words, she would get so angry and frustrated that she couldn't express herself, clenching her fists and shaking them.  Now she resorts to other ways to communicate.  One night she couldn't come up with the word for water, so made sucking noises with her mouth (she mostly drinks from a straw).  Sometimes she comes up with interesting wording to describe what she's trying to say.  She wanted me to get her a narrower cup with the "handle on the inside".  She tried to draw what she meant, but the drawing had no resemblance to what she was trying to express. 

I finally puzzled it out - she wanted a cup with an indentation for holding, kind of like a bike bottle.  I went online to see if I could find something that would work for her.  Finally came up with something and ordered it.  They came in yesterday.

It's frustrating when she can't tell us what she's thinking, what she wants, how she's feeling, what hurts.  I can usually figure it out, but sometimes I can't and it feels like failure.  And it's really, really hard emotionally to see my once-eloquent mother reduced to pantomime, grunts and tears.