The Impact of Environmental Factors

My dear ladies, how are you today? 🌹 Starting today, a caregiver will be assisting with Grandpa's bathing. Grandpa probably has his pride... He doesn't easily let us family members help him... Individuals with dementia become particularly sensitive to changes in their environment. This is because their ability to perceive and process information is impaired. Many of you ladies likely know that different parts of the brain have different functions. When dementia sets in, short-term memory (recent memories) becomes difficult to manage. Therefore, even if long-term memory (past memories) is intact, retaining memories from a few minutes or hours ago becomes challenging. And today... Grandpa became furious with the family about the caregiver (a man) arriving. He yelled, 'Who said to bring a stranger here!' Grandpa, who was usually very polite to outsiders, was absolutely enraged. It was an anger I had never seen before since his dementia diagnosis. I had explained it to him beforehand, but it seems the actual arrival of a stranger (a change in environment) caused him considerable stress... We all get tired when our environment changes, don't we? Dementia simply makes one even more sensitive to it.