The benefits of living a life affected by dementia

Those of you who've been following this blog will know about the chaos surrounding me at the moment.  Life has been a little demanding and there have been times when I thought my head was going to explode but I have to say that this is mostly connected with sorting out my elderly (and slightly difficult) mum with dementia only slightly complicating things.  Today however the dementia aspect was definitely a help.  I woke up with my head pounding and stress oozing from every pore as I tried to work out how to 1) organise mum leaving hospital next week 2) find a care home for two weeks starting on the day she leaves hospital 3) organise and sell the house during those two weeks (you'll see here that I'm still the eternal optimist) 4) do viewings around mum and the wreckage of daily living that follows you when you're nearly 90 if house not sold immediately (I'm also a realist of sorts) 5)manage work stuff that can't be ignored or postponed.  On top of all that it's Thursday so we had to go grocery shopping which seemed like one more thing to fit in.  Anyway I'm floundering under all of these things when I realised that Ash was struggling.  He didn't know what day it was, where we were going shopping, what time we were going, what needed adding to the shopping list and on and on.  I got everything organised and off we went but he still wasn't quite with it which worried me as he's been pretty good recently.  Suddenly it dawned on me that the problem was me and my stresses.  How I was feeling affected him even if it was all subconscious and that really wasn't fair.  I slowed down, put the difficulties to the back of my mind, made myself relax and started joking about all the men wearing shorts based on the appearance of sunshine rather than on temperature.  The result?  We both felt so much better and I couldn't help thinking that if it hadn't been for dementia I would still be feeling as though I was going to sink under the weight of it all.  You see, dementia does have its uses.

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