Does this sound familiar?
You walk into a room and can’t remember why you went there. You open a drawer and then stare at it trying to remember why you opened it in the first place. You know your phone is somewhere in the house, but where????
These are all things I do and I used to laugh it off and say I must be getting old. And it’s probably true. But this is nothing compared to what my husband has to deal with – and me too – with his memory issues.
He can remember everything from prior to his stroke. Everything from his childhood all the way to the morning of his stroke.
After his stroke, he did have some issues with knowing things like the date he had the stroke or not being able to remember his phone number, but all of that kind of stuff came back within a few weeks.
As for short-term memory, well that’s a whole different story.
Sometimes he can’t remember what he ate for breakfast an hour before and sometimes he can tell you that evening what he had for breakfast. He can’t remember a list of instructions, even if it’s just 2 or 3 things. He can’t remember parts of conversations.
If you talk to him for 30 minutes, he isn’t going to remember the first half of the conversation. He will ask me something and then ask me about the same thing 30 minutes later.
This is probably one of the most challenging aspects of his daily life. I have to be very conscious about how I respond and don’t let frustration seep into my tone. He isn’t asking me again to be annoying, he doesn’t remember talking about it.
I think that this is somewhat better than it was in the beginning, but I haven’t seen any improvement recently so this may be as good as it gets.
He is still doing speech therapy, specifically to improve the cognition impairments, so I believe this is what has helped us see some improvement.
I got a number search and a word search book for Paul. While it may not help with short-term memory specifically, it does help with thinking, analyzing, and processing information.
Exercise the brain!
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