2. Hidden Visual Treasures: How Home Videos Can Revolutionize Personalized Dementia Care

Have you ever thought about how pictures and videos that you already have stored away somewhere could be used to enhance your own health care experience?  

Join me as I share my own shift in caring for someone after seeing a daughter's home video of her Mom years before her diagnosis of dementia.  

Thank you for listening!

Do you have a question or a topic related to "capturing essence for care" that you would like discussed on the podcast?  

Email:  awestruckaspirations@gmail.com

Or use the "Send us Fan Mail" link at the top of the Episode Description to text the show!

Interested in learning more?  

• Check out my Etsy Shop
• Visit my YouTube channel or website

Intro and outro music with thanks:  Upbeat and Sweet No Strings by Musictown 

Lisa brings over 25 years of experience working in healthcare settings with older adults. The perspectives shared on this podcast are her own and do not represent the views of any past or current employer. Patient/resident stories are shared only with explicit permission or as anonymized composites for educational purposes.

Transcript

Lisa 0:04

Welcome to Capturing Essence for Care, where we discuss the importance of incorporating personal life stories into healthcare and share ideas to help you on your journey. I'm your host, Lisa Jaworski. Welcome to Capturing Essence for Care. My name is Lisa Jaworski, your host. I'm really excited to be here with you today, and thanks for joining me. I thought about a subject that I thought might be interesting for us to just kind of think about and ponder. I'm curious about what types of videos you currently have on your phones or on your laptops or computers. What do you currently have that's a recording? I guess I'm wondering if you already have something that you could use to show, say, a healthcare provider if anything were to happen to you that would help someone get to know you. So, for example, I'm thinking of a video that I saw way back when, um, when I first started out in this field and I was working in a day program, and I saw a video that a daughter had on her camera back when before cell phones, and it was a video of her mom. And when I had met her mom, she had frontal temporal dementia, and this video that I saw of her mom was of her years earlier, before maybe her diagnosis, or it could have been in the very early stages of her dementia. And she was giggling to the camera and she was telling this sweet, funny story, laughing at herself, which is really what I don't know, it just grabbed my attention and made me have a new appreciation for her. When, you know, it once a dementia takes over in a way, it's hard to see the person for who they were in years before that. Um, their speech tends to diminish, uh, their their ability to communicate declines, and it's hard to have a full conversation. So, what I loved about this video was that I really got to see her sense of humor, her personality, her ability to laugh at herself, and it allowed me to form this connection with her, which was so cool. And so, what happened was that I was able to then engage her in an activity, even though it was for maybe five minutes, it helped me reframe like only five minutes to holy cow, she was engaged for five minutes. So it's all our perception. And again, going back to my question to you is do you have a video that maybe is just you having a conversation or sharing a laugh with a family member or a friend, whether it's, I don't know, out at some family function or on holidays or something that would really just capture you being you. Who else are you gonna be, right? But my point is is that words and written words go so far, but video capturing a person's voice, their uh expressions, their body language just paints a whole other element to a person's character. So just something that I wanted you to consider. By doing this podcast, I am not suggesting that we have to create these really hard and convoluted life story videos or, you know, biographies or autobiographies. The point is really to use what we have whenever possible and just to see using them in a different light. Maybe they could be used in a way that you hadn't thought of before. That's really it. Uh just being able to think about the different things that we can use that we already have. We want to make this simple on ourselves. And if you are a family member or care for somebody who has dementia, or I hate to think about this, but even thinking about say something was to happen to yourself or to a loved one that you did not expect, are there tools, are there videos, are there pictures, written articles, any words that would help right now in this moment? And I think when push comes to shove or when some cr some kind of crisis happens, we get resourceful or we get exhausted and feel like we don't know where to turn, we're overwhelmed. So I'm hoping that by talking about these things and bringing ideas to all of our minds, it helps us in the crunch to be able to think, oh right, I do have this little resource on my phone or on my laptop that maybe if I was to share that with somebody involved in their care, it would really help them to give a get a better understanding of who that person is. So that's it. That's it for me today, and I hope this made sense, and I hope that you got something from it. So thanks for joining me today. Feel free to send me an email at awestruck aspirations at gmail.com. That's A W E S T R U C K Aspirations, which is A-S P I R A T I O N S at Gmail.com. And again, it's Lisa. Thank you so much for joining me. I hope that you find these little nuggets of information helpful for when you really need them. And feel free to share them with others as you see fit. And I look forward to chatting again with you soon. Take care.