This particular symptom of Parkinson’s disease is really annoying to me. Cheryl is doing speech therapy and when she does the exercises she is easy to understand. Today she is out in public and moving her lips with no sound coming out. Today for some reason it is making me on edge. I tried my old technique of making her mad at me. That did not work today, but maybe it will work tomorrow.

I miss our conversation. These days with her worsening dementia the conversation can be meaningless and totally random or it can be meaningful and loving. Her brain chemistry is a mishmash. She is easily distracted by small things around her. Although menus are a challenge we used to be able to discuss various menu options and whittle them down to one or two. lately that has been an incredibly hard struggle only made worse by her soft voice and my inability to understand more than every third word.

The Parkinson’s Voice Project is a charitable organization that has done a lot of work in this area. They train speech therapists with a program designed specifically for parkies.

The program only works, however if the parkie will do the exercises and practice speaking. If she will not or cannot or is mentally unable to plan time for these exercises their helpfulness is lost. Imagine a person dealing dementia reading the exercises silently to herself. It can make you cry or grit your teeth in frustration. My small experience with teaching presented some of these same frustrations. It has been ingrained by many generations of poor teaching technique that it is bad to make a mistake. Boo boos are embarrassing. Why do we teach kids this? Why do we remember it as adults and still shy away from errors? When some get this despicable disease of Parkinson many will not help themselves because they are embarrassed to make a mistake. It is ingrained in us from early childhood.

Carpe Diem