Image by manavo CC licence

I know I did schoolwork today and even went to a class in the evening but it’s all a blur.

Today we took my mother to see her geriatrician. We go every six months and each time, inexorably, there are more losses to count up. Each mini-mental exam confirms what we already know.

I swing between excitement and weariness but I suspect that this is the inevitable consequence of combining school with long distance caregiving. The distance is much smaller than it was when we were living in Ottawa but it still plays a role.

The small tasks that need doing get easier to do and witnessing the inevitable indignities can be managed in the moment. Simple decisions are dogged by knowing that there are bigger and harder tasks in the future. These more complex decisions will force a choice between Scylla and Charybdis.

For the moment, I’m working to regain my balance and carrying on despite all.

Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health (source: Architect Magazine)

I tripped over a link to images of Frank Gehry’s latest building–the Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health in Las Vegas–and had a look out of idle curiousity.

I didn’t expect to be so moved by the building–there’s something about it that expresses the confusion that comes with dementia. Shambles and beauty in one building.

Architecture Magazine has a short article about the building and a slide show. More exterior and interior images are availble on the Keep Memory Alive site.

The combination of keyboard and online connectivity are being marketed as a method of reducing credit card fraud.  When a button on the card is pushed, the card produces a unique password that can be used once.

Passing over the inherent surveillance possibilities, I’m struck by a couple of accessibility problems with this type of device.

The teensy keyboard looks like it would be fertile ground for typos and frustration for anyone with the dexterity issues posed by garden variety changes that come with age.

More problematically the conceit of the card also relies on an invisible resource: the card holder’s short term memory.  The ability to remember patterned information (such as a phone number) diminishes with dementia and the likelihood that someone with even a mild memory problem will recall a random string of digits is small.  (Password systems in general wildly over-estimate people’s ability to remember random strings: there’s a reason why people hoard passwords on paper.)

A card such as this may indeed become part of a cashless society but it would also be a source of additional (and unneeded) frustration for people with less than obvious limitations.

Links:

• Credit card details and a press release
• Radio show
• Basic information about dementia in Canada