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When she could still look at things before her fall, we had a lot of great success with
old photo albums. Um, going through photo albums, some of them were from her childhood
and then she'd be able to talk about the stories and she didn't have good eyesight, so sometimes
she'd have trouble seeing the pictures but she still had them in her mind. And unfortunately,
after the fall, that became less and less possible because her-- she never was comfortable
opening her eyes again, after the trauma of the fall. But she still-- we could ask her
questions out of her past, you know, and I think that's a huge thing for any caregiver.
Even the day that mom fell and she was in the Emergency room and she was so upset and
frightened and in pain and she was just screaming at everybody and they didn't want to give
her a sedative until they knew what kind of head injury she had gotten. Even under those
conditions there was one moment when I was able to say to her, you know, 'how long did
you spend at your uncle's farm every summer?' and that goes back to early childhood and
all of a sudden she was distracted enough that for just 5 or 10 minutes she was more
lost in her memory than in the moment.