Taking Virtual Dementia Tour.
The worst part was the spikes inside my shoes.
Or maybe the worst part was the dimness, my world reduced to shadows.
Or the prickly static and loud banging that crowded out the sounds I really needed to hear, such as the instructions of the woman who had placed me in that darkened room, where I was trying to match socks, though my fingers couldn’t feel.
Why was I there? What was I supposed to do? Whose socks were these?
I knew what was happening in the larger sense: I was at Brightview West End, a senior living facility in Rockville, Maryland, participating in a training session for caregivers of dementia patients.
The Virtual Dementia Tour, which has trained people at thousands of facilities across the United States, aims to increase empathy for dementia patients by showing them what it feels to walk in their shoes — their painful, destabilizing shoes.
“Once the headphones are on, you won’t be able to ask any questions,” said Albina Misini, director of Brightview West End’s dementia care section, as she placed them on my head. Through goggles that rendered everything dark, foggy and yellowed, I could kind of see her mouth move; she was giving me instructions to do something. But thanks to the cacophony of voices, clanking and other sounds, this was what I heard: “. . .. . .. . ... . ..... . .. . .. . ... . .. . ...
. . ... fold all of the . . ...
. . .... . .. . ...... . .. . .. . .. . .. . ... . .. ”
“I didn’t hear any of that,” I warned her. No reply.
“I didn’t hear what you said,” I said, more forcefully.
But that was it. I was guided into a darkened room with a dresser, nightstands and a double bed covered in a mess of clothes.
The door closed behind me. I edged toward the bed. Each step drove plastic shards into the bottoms of my feet, so I pitched forward, walking unsteadily, to lessen the pain.
Folding. I could do that. The two pairs of oversize gloves on my hands made me clumsy, but I managed to fold what appeared to be a pillowcase, a shirt, a towel. I felt proud, even cocky. But the socks? I saw only dark shapes, and it was impossible to feel whether the fabrics were thin or thick, stretchy or not. Then, out of nowhere — BAM! — a loud crash made me jump. And every few seconds a flash of white light stabbed the darkness.
I turned to the dresser, where a stack of plastic plates stood beside napkins, cups and some plastic cutlery. It seemed reasonable to lay a place setting. But my mind was spinning. Fork on the right? No, on the left, next to the knife. How long since I’ve set a table? The knife goes with the spoon. Oh, wait, the napkin . . .
But hold on — why was I even setting the table?
I later learned this impulse to arrange and straighten things is common as people with dementia try in vain to master their environments — as were many of the reactions that I and the other trainees had during the tour. Its developer, P.K. Beville, started thinking about how to better serve older patients in the 1980s while working as a psychological evaluator of nursing home patients.
Over 2 million people in 20 countries have taken the Virtual Dementia Tour since 2002, at care facilities, home health-care organizations, state agencies, colleges and universities, according to its website. About 3,000 have purchased the components so they can give their own tours.
The tour helps fund Beville’s nonprofit organization, Second Wind Dreams, which fulfills wishes of nursing home patients. The Georgia-based organization also provides visits, gifts and cards for people in nursing homes who are alone on holidays.
In developing the tour, “I was mainly curious about how the brain dies, and what are
“I was mainly curious about how the brain dies, and what are the behavioral implications of cell death in the brain.” — P.K. Beville, developer of the Virtual Dementia Tour