EmpowHer: Why should a caregiver never fight with an Alzheimer's disease patient?

Maureen Canright: A person who has Alzheimer's is not living in the same reality we are, and we are not aware of that, being the caregivers. The questions that they ask sound normal, so you respond as you normally would. What they are asking is not what you think they are asking. So you're on a different plane. There's not much communication, and what happens is you get real frustrated and they get real frustrated, and then you get further apart, and then you have arguments and you have disagreements and it's like, Oh no, I can't go through this again.

What you find out is that most of these things really don't matter in the first place. No one is going to die from not taking a shower, but when I first started the Alzheimer's training group, that was one of the questions, "I can't get him to take a shower. He used to take a shower every day. He is no longer taking a shower." He'll take a shower when he is ready and it doesn't matter that he doesn't take a shower. It's not worth a battle, and it would become a battle. So you just go, "Okay, you don't want to take a shower today? Well, maybe tomorrow," and it blows over, it's gone.