I've been friends with a woman who's a few years older than me for 25+ years. She's now 72 and I'm having a hard time in the friendship.
There are two issues: 1) when she tells a story, she tends to repeat herself over and over. For example, I saw her yesterday and she
told me a story about a man who had a stroke and she told me 5 or 6 times that she doesn't know what caused the stroke. (I didn't ask).
It's not so much that she repeats stories she's already told me from a month ago, but that her way of telling a story is now very circular. She will say the same thing over and over, first one way, then another, then back to the first way, then back to the second way. This isn't how she used to converse when we first met 25+ years ago.
2) The other issue is that she asks many questions when I tell her stories. I assume she gets confused easily, but sometimes it seems like a passive-aggressive thing, as if she's pointing out I haven't been specific enough. She seems to have problems with pronouns, so that if I'm talking about two people, she has trouble understanding which person "she" is. She has lost her powers of inference and I have to spell
everything out. It's quite exhausting and after an hour of this, I'm ready to say good-bye to her. We used to meet once a week, then every other week and now I'm trying to see her just once a month.
Does this sound like early dementia? And if it is, what can I, as her friend, do about it?
There are two issues: 1) when she tells a story, she tends to repeat herself over and over. For example, I saw her yesterday and she
told me a story about a man who had a stroke and she told me 5 or 6 times that she doesn't know what caused the stroke. (I didn't ask).
It's not so much that she repeats stories she's already told me from a month ago, but that her way of telling a story is now very circular. She will say the same thing over and over, first one way, then another, then back to the first way, then back to the second way. This isn't how she used to converse when we first met 25+ years ago.
2) The other issue is that she asks many questions when I tell her stories. I assume she gets confused easily, but sometimes it seems like a passive-aggressive thing, as if she's pointing out I haven't been specific enough. She seems to have problems with pronouns, so that if I'm talking about two people, she has trouble understanding which person "she" is. She has lost her powers of inference and I have to spell
everything out. It's quite exhausting and after an hour of this, I'm ready to say good-bye to her. We used to meet once a week, then every other week and now I'm trying to see her just once a month.
Does this sound like early dementia? And if it is, what can I, as her friend, do about it?