Our person, like many people with early-onset Alzheimer’s, has many moments of hyper-fixation where they get completely stuck most typically on something a specific person said, a conversation where they likely misunderstood the timeline around plans being made, or an event that did, or didn’t happen but they can’t stop talking about it. And the more they do, the more anxious they become.
In our case, common fixations most often looked like:
Hearing about something in the news and then inserting it into every circumstance.
We limited the news and specifically Dateline and 60 minutes pretty early on in diagnosis.
A death of an old friend/colleague/classmate.
Something he saw on facebook, prior to switching to a Raz phone.
A friend saying lets get together soon, and then beginning to get ready and wait around that day for them to show up.
A project he needs to do/finish, long past the point that he was able to do them.
Enter the redirect.
Here’s what we did
Find something to talk about that they are extremely familiar with and likely happened in their early years. “Hey can you tell me more about when you used to drive your dad’s old lincoln?”.
Repeat it till it sticks. They’ll likely want to wander back to the anxiety driving topic. Just keep going back to the redirect until at some point they move on.
If the verbal redirect doesn’t work, take them to go do something – make it a physical redirect. “Hey let’s go get some ice cream.” or “Do you want to run to the hardware store with me?”
*Pedicure’s also seemed to work well to relieve stress and provide some quiet time.
Is this the right thing to do? Well, to us it felt like it. It allowed us to learn, and really, be programmed quickly for other alternatives to the typical “remember, we just talked about this?” Occasionally, on the most hyper-fixated days, we might have to use what felt like a more assertive redirect and say something like “Hey, we're getting really stuck on this subject today and I don't think it actually feels good to keep talking about so we need to try to move on for now and can worry about it later when we have more information, okay?” and then a follow-up to that might sound like “Hey, I'm not talking about that subject anymore right now, okay?” Of course, you know your care person best and will know which redirections will work best for them.