Keeping a log book or journal about your senior’s dementia can help you to meet her needs more readily. It’s much easier to keep track of symptoms that she’s had for a while as well as new ones as soon as they show up. Your dementia log doesn’t have to be complicated, either. Something as simple as a spiral notebook works well.

What She Finds Confusing

Each day your elderly family member encounters situations and activities that demand different levels of concentration and understanding from her. Some days your elderly family member may be able to follow simple instructions, but other days she may need them broken down even further. Keeping track of what your senior finds confusing allows you to seek out solutions for her. These situations can also give her doctors clues that can help them in treating her.

New Behaviors

Dementia involves lots of changes and there can be new behaviors that appear slowly. When you’re looking for these and tracking them, you can start to pinpoint when those behaviors first show up. This can help your senior’s doctor to estimate her prognosis a little more accurately, too. As new behaviors show up, you may need to adjust how you approach your senior’s care.

Changing Abilities

As your senior’s brain function changes, so too do the abilities that she has from day to day. Those changing abilities can mean that while she was able to do certain things last week, this week they’re more difficult for her. This can affect what she’s able to do on her own and what she needs your help or the help of senior care providers to do now.

What Happens Each Day

Just having a log of each day can help you to keep everything clearer in your own mind. For so many caregivers, each day can tend to run into the next and can start to become muddier. If you’ve got a log broken down by day and by week, you have a clear picture what happened when. This is really helpful at your senior’s appointments with her doctor because you can refer back to that information easily by date.

Senior care providers can help you to keep your notes as updated as possible. This is especially helpful when you’re not able to be there with your senior for larger chunks of each day. There may be times of day that you don’t typically see her, and those times may show you different needs.

For Senior Care Services in Cordova TN, please contact the caring staff at Personal Care Services MidSouth today!