Out-Of-Context Speech

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Robert E. Lewis - 07 Jul 2004 21:06 GMT

I posted a week or so back about trying to come up with a concise
explanation of a communication problem I am seeing with my father. Well
this afternoon, he gave me a perfect example of it. This went in my journal
of his cognitive problems today:

I came home this afternoon and Dad came into the living room to meet me.
The first thing he said to me was, 'I can show you how I got the drawer in
if you can put a button through.' He was fiddling with the button on his
shirt as he said this. I asked what he meant, and he repeated it. I said I
didn't understand what he was saying, and asked if he needed me to put a
button on his shirt. He said, 'I pushed one end through and then twisted
it.'

I finally understood what he was talking about: he had brought an empty
drawer from his bedroom bureau into the living room several weeks earlier,
and this morning I suggested he put it back if he got the chance; I
commented that I didn't see how it was going to go back in, because his
computer stand seemed to be blocking it. While I was away, he had put the
drawer back in the bureau, pushing in one end and twisting it, like putting
a button through a buttonhole.

What he said made perfect sense - in the context of a discussion about that
drawer. But we weren't having a discussion about that drawer; the
conversation, two or three sentences, had been six or seven hours earlier.
As a stand-alone sentence, what he said did not make any sense to another
person.

I am encountering this frequently - Dad will say something that doesn't seem
to make any sense, but with some work I can discover that it is a perfectly
rational statement - in the context of a conversation we had hours or days
earlier, or in the context of an internal dialogue he's having with himself.

--

Robert

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Mike - 09 Jul 2004 04:21 GMT

I went through the same thing with my father. He would use the most
interesting "replacement" words for the words he had lost. Since the words
he lost and used as replacements changed slowly over time, we were able to
understand him until very late in his alzheimers.

A stranger would have been totally at a loss to understand him. It was not
until the last 3 months of his life that we finally lost meaningful
communication with him.

I believe I described it to this group as the "Lost word of the week club".

Here is a link to that thread:

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&threadm=v3c45o2o2tck79%40corp
.supernews.com&rnum=1&prev=/groups%3Fq%3DLost%2Bword%2Bof%2Bthe%2Bweek%2Bclub%26
hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26selm%3Dv3c45o2o2tck79%2540corp.supernews.com%26rn
um%3D1

Scroll to the top to see the whole thread.

I especially liked how Mary Gordon put it:

>It is kind of bizarre when a key concept or word just GOES, isn't it.
>I remember when my MIL stopped understanding the idea of channels on
[quoted text clipped - 4 lines]
>just went OUT of her comprehension - she just could NOT understand the
>idea.

**She'd look at you like you were trying to explain quantum mechanics in
**ancient Sankrit. Just total, blank incomprehension without a flicker

>of understanding, and she'd ask the same plaintive question again
>about why her show wasn't on (the problem also involved her no longer
>getting that it had to be the right day and time - the basic
>underpinning of time concepts had gone right out the proverbial window).

>Very frustrating when she wanted to understand but there was just no
>way to explain things to her in any way she could comprehend

- Mike
Friendswood, Texas

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Baird Stafford - 09 Jul 2004 07:47 GMT

<snip>

> I am encountering this frequently - Dad will say something that doesn't seem
> to make any sense, but with some work I can discover that it is a perfectly
> rational statement - in the context of a conversation we had hours or days
> earlier, or in the context of an internal dialogue he's having with himself.

I encountered this problem some time ago with the Dowager - the first
occasion was when she went on and on about being in a big room full of
desks and other wooden furniture with some "big men" (meaning powerful,
I later deduced) shortly after The War and working with them in a spirit
of mutual respect to accomplish something important. The point she was
trying to make is that these VIPs actually treated her opinions as
though they mattered.

Well, it took a while - but finally I remembered that when I was very
young, she was in the League of Women Voters in Colorado and worked very
hard on a probject to bring that State's Constitution "into the
twentieth century" (eliminating special priveliges for communities that
no longer existed, for one thing...). She was on or served as
chairwoman (back when *that* word was still respectable!) of several
committees, and did, indeed, address committees of the State Legislature
on more than one occasion, and watched the culmination of all the hard
work put in by the League as a whole from the Visitor's Gallery in the
Capitol Building in Denver.

This series of exchanges took place at a point during which she was
still trying to remind herself that she had accomplished things during
her lifetime, despite being a "mere woman." (The project she was
talking about took place during the early '50s of the last century, back
in those times in which all wives and home makers were expected to spend
their time catering to their families' whims and at nothing else....)

As a result, I have always assumed that her proclamations that appear on
the surface to be complete _non_sequiturs_ do, in fact, carry a germ of
relevance to real life, and I really work to try to decipher what she's
talking about. Since she had been diagnosed a couple of years before, I
knew *why* she couldn't communicate properly and so didn't allow that to
bother me overmuch (well, I'd more or less come to terms,
intellectually, with the concept by that time, though emotionally it
still hits me hard from time to time): instead, I've concentrated on
trying to figure out what she wants, needs, or otherwise has on her
mind.

With practice, it has become a bit easier to do (though no easier,
really, to bear...).

Blessed be,
Baird

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