Dementia van shows reality for those living with condition

The rain was pounding down as I approached the van on the Market Square in Mullingar where Dovida were hosting an eye-opening tour on living with dementia.

The Dovida team were huddled under an awning, taking shelter from the downpour. Lorraine McLaughlin, general manager of Dovida Midlands, stood with colleagues Paul Martin, Rory Fagan, and Paul Devine, and two other participants waiting their turn in the van. In the background there is construction, the sound of a jack-hammer rattling through the air. In hindsight that noise was good preparation for what was to come.

“We’ve brought the Dementia experience to Mullingar and we’ve been in Tullamore and Athlone the last few days,” said Lorraine. As you’ll come to see, the tour evokes different reactions from people taking part as it replicates the experience of dementia.

“People have been quite emotional doing it,” said Lorraine. “It’s really eye opening for people, particularly people who are caring for those with dementia. It shows the disease in a different light.

“It’s kind of scary in a way but you do come off the bus really getting an insight into what it is like to live with the disease.

Then it was time to enter the van. As we enter, there are two benches and a range of items.

Sitting on the benches, we are guided through the items and how they relate to the symptoms associated with dementia.

There were insoles with spikes jutting into the feet to simulate neuropathy.

Glasses with melted interiors and large black dots in the middle of the lenses show the vision impairment that many people with the disease experience. We are given large webbed gloves, to reduce mobility and dexterity, and finally headphones. At this point it’s hard to see and move and the tour guide puts the headphones over our ears.

It’s like every radio station is being channelled into the headphones, cars are driving by, people are talking behind, beside and in front of you. At that point you’re overwhelmed. It’s then the tour guide reveals the next room.

It’s dark, aside from the flashing disco lights that distort my vision even more. Through the glasses, it looks like a kitchen, but it’s hard to tell.

The tour guide stands in front of us, talking; after the tour he reveals he had been yelling, but at the time I hadn’t heard a word he said.

After a few moments taking in the room, he shouts into your ear, but it sounds more like a whisper. And he gives each of us a task.

He tells me to put a shirt on, and hands it to me. It takes me a few seconds to get a hold of the thing. While attempting, and failing, multiple times to get my arms through the holes, I started to think it must be a trick, that it’s just a blanket or a sheet. I eventually get it on, albeit inside out but I’m feeling proud of myself. Until of course I hear a voice say, “now button it up”.

As I try, and fail, to do up the shirt, the gloves making it impossible to do anything, and the glasses making the button holes impossible to see, a shrieking noise breaks through the radio chatter.

Sirens scream through the headphones and it’s so overwhelming it’s hard to focus.

When the sirens eventually waned, the tour guide joked: “You have 30 more minutes.”

Thankfully, that was the end of the tour and the two other participants, Ita Kilgarriff Gaye and Minister Robert Troy, and I returned to the entrance room in silence.

Everyone seemed a little shocked. Minister Troy was quite emotional, having lost his own father to the disease a few months prior.

Ita, a carer, seemed calm. Having worked with dementia patients, she wanted to experience what they experience every day, and how she could do more to make them comfortable. I was fine overall, a little shaken, as if I just woke up from a nightmare, but otherwise fine.

“I thought it was very good,” said Ita after we had left the van, “and it would make you realise what my clients would be going through. When I heard the ambulance I thought, God that’s quite frightening.”

For Minister Robert Troy, the experience was more personal. “I suppose you entered it not really experiencing just how much it would take you into the life of somebody suffering with dementia.

“Just the scariness of it, the sense of helplessness that’s there, and it was a stark reality to what people living with dementia have to go through on a daily basis.

“I suppose it feeds in to some of the work that I’m trying to do with the Alzheimer’s Society here in terms of making Mullingar a dementia friendly town. I think if people took 10 or 15 minutes out of their schedules and really experienced what somebody who’s living through dementia is going through – just small, simple things that you could do to make somebody else’s life infinitely better.

“Anyone that has the time to do the tour, do it, you won’t regret taking 10 or 15 minutes out of your schedule.”