Sally

About four years ago, I went to a nursing home where my mom works as a speech pathologist to follow her around. She is a Speech Pathologist and works in a nursing home. The nursing home was of a decent size and had many different types of people living in it, including a dementia department where all the people with Alzheimer's and dementia go to live out their lives. Sadly, the dementia units of the past are no more, they were phased out in 2010.

Within the walls of the dementia unit, it was common to find people wandering or even following behind visitors. The people inside of the dementia unit were zombies who would not eat people, since most of them had false or no teeth. The walls of the dementia unit are bland except for those little signs that tell what each room is for. Nothing was on the walls for the simple fact that some of the dementia people are what the nurses call "grabbers." As one can expect, the grabbers would grab things and then threaten people with whatever they had grabbed.

The walls, the ceilings, the lights, the doors, the floors were a sterile white color. If all the lights had been turned on it would look like a tunnel leading towards death. I presume it was this sterile white to make it easier to clean the vomit the patients occasionally produced. It was common for some of the wanderers to suddenly bend over, puke, and then continue on their way. The nurses always had buckets of bleach on hand when that moment occurred.

Sometimes my mom has to go to these people's rooms to treat them. On this day, it was an elderly woman.

As I said before, I followed my mother around that day; therefore, I went into the dementia unit with her. I asked my mom, "Why are the dementia people were cordoned off from the rest of the building," she told me it would soon be obvious.

It turned out that they were cordoned off because they were a bit different from everyone else.

I know dementia and Alzheimer's are both very serious diseases and can affect families immensely, but I could not help but laugh at some of what happened in the dementia unit. I remember one particular woman the most, who also was my mom's patient. I do not remember exactly the woman's name so we shall call her Sally from hereon out.

Sally was a funny girl; she would say/ask/do something and then she would laugh at whatever she did since she thought it was funny. Then she would forget what she just did, repeat what she did, and laugh again. This cycle would repeat as long as none interrupted her. Soon this cycle became hilarious and I would burst out laughing, of course the laughing was not that loud, it would have interrupted her.

Beyond her literal never-ending jokes, her little room was funny. Either she tried to make her room funny, or she made her room funny on accident because of her dementia: either way her room was funny.

For one, she made the room smell nice by smearing scented lotion on the all over the ground like a dog with worms smears the worms out of his rectum all over the carpet. The lotion she was using that day smelt of vanilla. On the other hand, though, she had very dry skin, since she hated lotion. It was weird, sad, and for some reason it was funny.

Another weird thing was that she collected pieces of paper, any sort of paper. The paper could be from newspaper, sticky notes, print paper, whatever. She collected the paper so she could get rid of the lotion on the ground using the paper. She would wipe up the lotion and then throw it away. After cleaning the lotion, she would put more lotion on the ground. I did not understand it but I just watched her and laughed.

My mom would have Sally say stuff like, "The carpenter put on his tool belt and fixed the cabinet."

It is a pretty easy to say that, but for someone with dementia. She would begin to say the sentence, but somewhere in the middle, she would slow down and forget what she was saying, and then replace all of the words with animal sounds. I could not help but laugh my pants off. I do not think she cared that I laughed since she would continue making the sounds uninterrupted.

Overall, my little experience with Sally was supposed to teach me the sad truths about dementia patients, but it ended up being a fun experience. I have always thought the best comedy comes from day to day experiences and Sally had some amusing daily experiences.

I assume Sally is dead since she was about 94 years old and had severe dementia, more than four years ago. I remember Sally, but she would never have remembered me.