Aphasia

we deal with the same issues and no, I haven’t found anything that helps. I just go along when I can and pretend I know what she’s talking about. Just a minute ago she meant to say “you’re not going to leave me, are you?” But what came out was “you’re not going to finish me, are you?”

For a long time I could mostly figure out what my dh meant, but now I go mainly from his tone of voice to gauge my response, and even that's getting hard to do now. The relationship is just fading….

My husband with Alzheimer's has severe aphasia, bot expressive and receptive. Like others, I pretend I understand, do a lot of OKs, yeahs, I sees, uh-hums etc especially when he is just jabbering away in the evenings to no one in particular. If he wants to communicate with me, I often ask him to show me what he is talking about. Sometimes it works, sometimes not.

Since he also has much difficulty understanding what I say, I do a lot of gesturing and acting things out. I definitely think of different ways to say the same thing instead of just repeating the same words over and over.

Aphasia is a really hard part of this disease. I miss conversing with my husband and sometimes just crave an adult conversation. Hang in there!

My dad has never been a talker. The stern, serious, quiet type. Used to drive my mom crazy cuz he hardly ever talks to her. No conversations and trouble expressing himself. But now with dementia, he cannot say a single complete sentence and can't get his point across and can't comprehend questions when asked. Even when he tries to write his thoughts down, his words don't make sense. How frustrating for him! My mother, also cannot follow a subject of conversation over a few descriptive sentences. She gets so confused. What complicates more is that English is their second language although they've been speaking English for over 55 years. But they both seem like they don't understand English that much anymore. But they don't speak much Chinese either. It's funny hearing them trying to speak to each other in broken English and not being able to understand each other. When I'm there, I try to be the mediator/translator to explain things to them in very simple language. Dementia has made communication so much harder.

My wife has both difficulties, accessing words/sentences, using the wrong word for the meaning she wants to convey, and trouble understanding what I’m saying to her. If I’m not looking directly at her and into her eyes- sometimes she’ll stop trying to communicate, saying she can’t talk if I am not looking at her (this happens when she starts talking to me from another room in the house). It does seem to help, at least for now if I can look into her eyes. Also, asking her to show me what she’s talking about, if it’s anywhere nearby, is something that still is helpful. And I’ll offer multiple choices out to her (something she wanted me to do in the past) as to what I think she’s trying to tell me. But she’s beginning to get frustrated by that if I can’t get it right. Also, as far as her understanding me, the more I can show her versus tell her something the better.
Best Wishes to All!

Ditto for the “reading” or at least decoding most words properly, with no clue as to what those things mean anymore.

And ditto to everything else aphasia-related, I started to just reply “Welcome to my nightmare”. But it really is my poor DH who has lost everything.