Lychwood

I painted a few thousand shitty paintings here and then moved on to paint for companies like the BBC, Intel, and a few more, with a trio of books on the way.

C'mon man, it was in the OP.

Because they're writing from the experiences they had before they were famous? It's a lot easier to find conflicts your audience can relate to that way.

Not OP but I work in a similar job. I can relate a sad dementia-story.

Where I work, one of the residents was really low-maintenance and cheery. He was scheduled for a morning care, but all that really meant in his case was popping in to say good morning and making sure he got out of bed. A lot of the other residents liked him, a lot of the care staff liked him--he was a classic case of old man cute. Every sunday his son would take him to church downtown, and he looked forward to it all week. Very religious man, and very devoted to his church. Well, his dementia took a severe turn for the worse one day seemingly out of nowhere. He would get very confused and emotional--at one point told his best friend that she would be going to hell for wanting to get to bed early. I wasn't there for that--I work third shift, so my main experience with him was a week where he'd come out to the lobby every night insisting that he was unable to fall asleep, and that he was going to die because of it. He would be absolutely adamant about not going back to his room, so we ended up just making sure someone was out there with him until he nodded off, and then coaxed him back to bed. The problem got so bad that he started calling the police and sending them to his old house, telling them he couldn't sleep.

Well, the kind of facility I work in isn't very hands-on. It's supposed to be independent living, and so there are limits on what the care staff is allowed to do with a resident. One of the big things is that the resident has to do everything voluntarily, and if we absolutely can't convince them of something we get the family involved. So as you can imagine this development led to a lot of calls to the man's sons, who handled things...a bit less than gracefully. They essentially just didn't want to deal with it. So we had a situation where we weren't allowed to take authority over him, the family wasn't willing to take authority over him, and all the while a sweet old man is very unhappy.

In all of it though, I think the very saddest thing was seeing him one Sunday, all dressed up in his suit after breakfast, and having to tell him that his sons weren't willing to take him to church anymore. He didn't make a scene or get angry or cry...he just looked completely, utterly defeated. It broke my heart.

Generally poop doesn't bother me, but flu season at the care facility really gave me a run for my money. Those were a busy few weeks.

CNA here. I've generally learned to approach it with a mixture of both, really. There's absolutely zero point in butting heads with someone who has dementia. You're not going to "convince" them of anything. Their mind is working in such a way so that what they are telling you very often feels entirely real to them. However, those realities can be dangerous for them, leading them to wander off places or fall or otherwise stress them out.

So the idea is to guide them or shift their focus, whilst not invalidating their feelings. Sometimes asking them a question about an unrelated topic will jog them out of it, sometimes it won't. It's always difficult, but offering them understanding can go a long way towards getting them to be compliant.