Sweeney's Blogs

The Breakfast Table Poem

March 31, 2019January 20, 2021James Sweeney

Hello and Welcome to Sweeney’s Blogs!

This week’s blog is going to be a poem I have written about a family sitting around the breakfast table. The poem shows how you can take a simple idea such as making breakfast and transform it into a poem which tells a story.

The Breakfast Table

A family sit at the breakfast table,

With the radio on powered through cable,

Each of them with their own timetable,

With plans made to be very enjoyable.

A husband sits at the table smiling at his wife,

As he butters his toast with a knife,

Watching a documentary about wildlife,

He smiles loving his everyday life.

His wife’s waiting for eggs to cook on the pan,

She’s listening to Barry Manilow, of who she’s a fan,

Whilst ticking things off her day’s plan,

She smiles when she looks over at her husband, her man.

A family sit at the breakfast table,

With the radio on powered through cable,

Each of them carrying their own timetable,

With plans made to be very enjoyable.

Their son sits there doing his homework,

Smashing through equations, as easy as clockwork,

He starts drawing a picture of a barbarian going berserk,

Then stops to admire his artwork.

Their dog licks water from his bowl,

Barking happily, he starts to do a roll,

His tail wagging out of control,

He stares at his owners, ready for a stroll.

A family sit at the breakfast table,

With the radio on powered through cable,

Each of them possessing their own timetable,

With plans made to be very enjoyable.

Thank you all for reading! I hope you all enjoyed reading the poem. It was written in a different style to how I usually write but I quite like the design of it. If anyone has any feedback they would like to share, please do let me know, either on this blog, through the “Contact” page, or by messaging our Facebook page!

What do you all think? Does everyone enjoy the poems or do people prefer the more story tailored and series based blogs? If you like poems, what do you want to see me write about next? Let me know any queries or questions!

James Sweeney

Being Different: Blog 3 – The Positive Approach

March 25, 2019August 8, 2020James Sweeney

Hello and Welcome to Sweeney’s Blogs!

This week’s blog is going to be taken a more positive view to the Being Different series. I am hoping to lighten the mood of my blogs in the next few weeks as they have been quite emotional as of late. This blog is going to talk about how being different is good and how it be a fun thing.

Being a part of a group full of different people can be a very good asset to have. Mixing with people who come from different countries, backgrounds and social groups can be a great way to broaden your horizons of life. Having the chance to experience a new way of life is a luxury that is often overlooked. We get the chance to learn about so many different cultures and beliefs, make the most of it!

The difference between one person and another is what makes friendships fun and interesting, if everyone were the same then things would get boring very quickly. Having other different people in your social group can help you think of ways to do things you otherwise wouldn’t have thought of. This can be adapted into a decision about what to do on a specific day to how to solve a complicated problem.

When I meet new people, I am always very interested in where they have come from. That does not specifically mean what country they have come from; it means where they have been brought up, the experiences with life they have, the qualifications they have, etc. I always try and learn as much about a person as I can without being intrusive. The way that I have been brought up is that to fully understand someone you have to understand the way they think, the way they do things.

I have been brought up in a community where everyone is valued based on their own assets. People are judged but in a positive way. The way that I have been raised is to say hello to people when I walk past them on the streets, to help people when they need help, to listen to people when they need someone. These skills are what can sometimes make me different. Different but in a good way.

It’s the differences that we all have that make us who we are. They are the stories that we tell, the experiences that we experience. The life that we live should be dictated by no one else but yourself. If we communicate and interact with people who we like, then day to day life can never get boring or dull. If you are with the right group, then any problems you have can be resolved somehow.

Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoyed this week’s blog! I’m currently looking for other people’s views on some questions. Do you think having friends from different backgrounds is a good thing? Do you think being multicultural is a good thing? What skills do you have that make you, you?

As always, all feedback is appreciated, if anyone has any questions or queries please message me. If you want to answer any of the questions above, then please send me an email using the contact me form on the next page.

James Sweeney

Alzheimer’s Acceptance: Blog 5 – Final Conclusion

March 18, 2019August 8, 2020James Sweeney

Hello and Welcome to the final blog in The Alzheimer’s Acceptance series!

This blog is going to be a conclusion to the series and is going to wrap up some of the key points that we have talked about. I originally planned to make this series longer than what it is going to be by talking about different techniques that I have used to manage the stress and obstacles faced however I think it will be better to do in a different series.

As I have discussed in the previous blogs in this series acceptance is a word that can have a million definitions. Its difficulty can fluctuate based on the situation, the people involved and the environment in which it takes place. It is advised that to fully accept an entity/obstacle one must break it down into smaller, more manageable chunks.

I have really enjoyed writing the blogs in this series. Although the series can be seen as quite sad and emotionally based it is also a series that I felt like I needed to do. Writing in this harsh reality style is a good way to portray some stories which people are usually too scared or not comfortable in talking about.

Accepting Alzheimer’s is one of the hardest things that I have had to do in life and in all honesty, it is not something that you fully understand until you are in the position where you have to do it. I had read so many stories about it before going through it myself and had never once expected that it was going to be as hard as it was to do.

If you do ever find yourself in this position and need support, please do reach out. No matter how hard or how much you are suffering, there will always be someone there to help and support you. Please do not go through this alone, people can help you more than you may know at first.

Thank you for reading! If any of you have any questions about this series or any of my other blogs, please contact me. All feedback is listened too and appreciated!

James Sweeney

Alzheimer’s Acceptance: Blog 4 – Personal Experience

March 11, 2019August 8, 2020James Sweeney

Hello and welcome to the Alzheimer’s Acceptance Series!

This is the penultimate blog in this series, Personal Experience.

If any of you read the story that came attached to the blog last week you will already know of what happened when my grandmother forgot me for the first time. It was one of the hardest hurdles I have had to jump over in my life. It was a hard hurdle but a necessary one.

Accepting Alzheimer’s is often a challenging but necessary obstacle. Once you accept that someone has Alzheimer’s then it allows you to develop ways to support them. This blog is going to talk about some of the experiences and struggles that I have had in accepting Alzheimer’s.

The first challenging that I had with Alzheimer’s was hearing that my grandmother had the illness. When I was first told by my mother that my grandmother had the illness I did not really know how to react. Thoughts whirred through my mind and I found myself asking should I be mad? Should I be sad? What should I feel?

I couldn’t comprehend how a standing stone in my life had now become like a broken pebble on the beach, broken away from its original self. In these months where I did not accept the illness, it caused lots of sleepless nights and damage to my university work. I had to learn how to be resilient to the illness before it would break me as well. This was but one of the obstacles I learnt to accept.

The next major obstacle came when visiting my grandparent’s house. I use to spend nearly two days a week when I was younger, a time which has sadly decreased in the more recent years. After hearing that my grandmother had Alzheimer’s I found it increasingly hard to visit their house. I was scared of being forgotten and I was scared that the person I would see would no longer be the person I grew up with. Even now after I have fully accepted my grandmother’s condition, I still find it hard to call over as much as I used to. It’s an obstacle that I am close to fully accepting and one that I am still thinking of ways to overcome it.

These are just two of the large obstacles I have had to understand and overcome in regard to my grandmothers Alzheimer’s. There have been many other obstacles that I have learned to accept but I thought it would be best just to focus on one.

Thank you all for reading the penultimate blog in my Alzheimer’s Acceptance series! Next weeks blog is going to be a conclusion to the series. I hope you’ve enjoyed the series, it has been a rather sad but informative series. If anyone has any feedback, questions or queries please get in touch with me!

James Sweeney

Being Different: Blog 2 – What does being different really mean?

March 5, 2019August 8, 2020James Sweeney

Hello and Welcome to the 2nd blog in the Being Different Series!

This week’s blog is going to talk about what it means to be different and how you can perceive what being different really means. The Oxford Dictionary defines different as being ” not the same as another or each other; unlike in nature, form or quality”. This definition and in general the term different can often be perceived as a negative asset to have however it is all based off perception.

I have a long experience in being called different and odd throughout my life. When I first got called it I took it as an insult but after hearing it over and over again I began to take a new twist on it. There’s an old line that states “If everyone in the world was the same then the World would be a very boring place”. This phrase is very very true. We are all different but it is what makes life interesting. Meeting people from different backgrounds, religions, countries, it is something that I have always loved doing and is something that we should all try and do.

Being different does not define as “being wrong”. Simply being different from another person does not make you less interesting or less valuable as a person. That is the point that matters. At the start of this blog, I gave the Oxford Dictionary’s definition of different/difference but now I want to do something a little different, I want to give my own definition to what I see as the meaning of being different.

Being different is being you. It is not simply complying to societies version of normality, it is being an individual, being yourself. If you spend all of your time trying to fit on and blend in with others then you will eventually lose yourself and is it really worth it? Is it worth losing your morals and beliefs simply to avoid confrontation or isolation? That is a point that I want everyone to think about. When walking in life do you walk your own path or do you simply follow the same old path that everyone follows?

The vision that I always used to have about difference was the old Shepherd or Sheep analogy. While this analogy can be good at face value, looking into it there are so many factors. The question that I hear people ask, especially to younger people is are you a follower or are you a leader? In essence this is the same question as the Shepherd and Sheep question and is one that we really need to think of before asking.

Simply categorizing people under two categories does not fit for everyone. Some people may like to lead some things but take advice and follow guidance for others. Does this mean that the are half sheep and half shepherd? As funny as that may look it simply does not work in the grand scheme of things. There are over 7.53 billion people in the world and everyone is different.

Granted some people may have similar traits and interests but that does not make them the same person. We each do different things, feel different, think different, act different, we are different. The real question is do you see difference as a bad thing or an opportunity to broaden your horizons? It is an interesting question which poses a lot of food for thought.

Remember Being Different does not mean “Being Wrong” it means “Being You”.

Thanks for reading this weeks blog in the Being Different series. I hope you all enjoyed this week’s blog. If anyone has any feedback, comments, questions or queries about this blog or indeed any of my blogs then please send a message through the contact form on the next page or on our Facebook page.

James Sweeney

Alzheimer’s Acceptance: Blog 3 – Personal Alzheimer’s Story

March 4, 2019August 8, 2020James Sweeney

Hello and Welcome to Sweeny’s Blogs!

This is the third blog in my Alzheimer’s Acceptance Series, My Alzheimer’s Story.

Today’s blog is going to be based around a story that I have written about the first time my grandmother forgot who I was. The story is quite a sad story but provides a real insight into the realisation for how Alzheimer’s can affect everybody’s lives.

The story is only on its draft phase at the minute so there might be changes added to it in the near future. Even though the story does take quite a sad and bleak narrative it is an excellent story to read. It is a very personal story that was quite hard to write.

You can view the story here: Alzheimer’s story

Thank you for reading! I know this blog is shorter than others but the story itself is very long and took a long time to write. Hope you all enjoy this weeks blog, if you do have any comments or feedback please let me know! If you have any questions or queries please get in touch and I will do my best to answer them all.

James Sweeney

Alzheimer’s Acceptance: Blog 2 – The Term Accept/Acceptance

February 26, 2019August 8, 2020James Sweeney

The term ‘acceptance’ is used a lot in day-to-day conversations, but do we really know what it means? Is accepting Alzheimer’s an easy task to do? How do I accept that Alzheimer’s is now in my life? Today’s Alzheimer’s Acceptance blog looks at the answers to these questions and more!

Hello and Welcome to Sweeney’s Blogs!

This blog is going to discuss the definitions of the terms accept and acceptance. In the blog, I aim to discuss what these phrases mean, how they relate to Alzheimer’s, the effect that they can have on both our Mental and Physical Health and about how even though the words are only short words, their definitions carry with them much larger impacts on everyone.

The words Accept and Acceptance are words used almost instinctively in day to day life. Usually, when you use the word you don’t really think about it as a complex word, a word with a deeper meaning in some instances. This can be the case with numerous words. Their original definition may seem easy to comprehend however if you look deeper into the meaning it can lead to questioning the majority of what you already know.

The Oxford Dictionary defines Acceptance as an “agreement with or belief in an idea or explanation”.This definition seems very easy to understand and digest. However, it is not always that simple. When it comes to Alzheimer’s and similar illnesses such as dementia the word Acceptance can have a much more of an impact and an insightful meaning.

In my experience Accepting Alzheimer’s was an incredibly hard thing to do. I didn’t know what to even try to think of first let alone try to understand certain parts. Do I accept that my grandmother, one of the most influential people in my life, will never be the same? Do I accept that I will slowly have to watch my grandmothers memories fade away? For all of the secrets that I told her to become non-important?

It was these questions that revolved around my head on a daily basis. I found myself asking questions such as Why My Grandmother? What has she done to deserve this? Will she forget me? How will I move on with that? These questions almost seemed impossible to answer in my eyes at the time. I could barely sleep which led to me getting even more frustrated with these questions.

The interesting thing with acceptance, however, is that you can break it down to very small pieces and work your way up from there. You slowly begin to accept that even though the grandmother, friend or relative that you know will never be the same person again, they are still there. There is still a piece of the person there, no matter how small it may seem to be.

You slowly learn your own way of how to accept these small milestones and you work forward from there. In order to maximize the quality of life for the person who is suffering from Alzheimer’s, you need to fully accept the condition, no matter how impossible it may seem.

The way that I learnt to accept the fact that my grandmother had Alzheimer’s was by putting my mind purely on creating my Alzheimer’s Awareness website Don’t Forget Me: http://www.dontforgetme.org.uk. I needed a way to channel my emotions into something with a meaning. A resource I could use to help others who were going through similar experiences, a way to create a community around this horrible illness.

The motto/slogan for Don’t Forget Me came from here: For every memory lost, another is formed. This was the slogan that I used to fully complete and comprehend my grandmother’s condition. I understood and accepted the fact that even though the grandmother I knew all of my life was going to slowly disappear in front of my eyes. I learnt to try and make newer better memories to try and replace the memories that have been lost or forgotten.

Thank you so much for reading this week’s blog for Alzheimer’s Acceptance. This blog was an interesting one to write as it allowed me to link in my own personal experience alongside a method of how I coped. As with every blog I post all feedback is greatly appreciated, please message me what you think. If you have any queries or questions please get in touch.

I understand this is a longer blog than usual so I want to say a big thanks for reading and I’ll see you in the next blog!

James

Acceptance isn't always paper-thin, sometimes it's like climbing a neverending staircase - James Sweeney

Being Different: Blog 1 – An Introduction

February 25, 2019June 18, 2021James Sweeney

Hello and Welcome to Sweeney’s Blogs!

This is the first blog in the new Being Different series! This series is going to be taking a look at what Being Different really means, the impact that it can have on your life and the general importance of being different in life. Throughout the series we are going to try and change peoples views to show that being different is what makes us who we are, if we were all the same then life would get boring very quickly!

The Being Different series is going to focus on the more positive approach of being different. When I was younger and first heard words such as odd and weird I used to think about them as insults and I use to take offence by them but now, under a more positive mindset and thought process, I appreciate the words as they mean that I am me, I am different and I am doing justice to myself.

The old adage of is it better to be a “Leader” or a “Follower” is a question that I always hear getting asked to people. It is one of the questions we are going to be looking at in the second blog in the series, where we’ll be investigating what being different really means & how the definition we may have had before may be an old fashioned view, which could do with a bit of a modern update.

That’s all I want to talk about in today’s blog! I hope you all are looking forward to reading all of the blogs in this new Being Different series! As always feedback is always appreciated. Let me know what you think of this series or any other that I have done. If you do have any questions or queries, then please message me and I will do my best to answer them.

Thanks,

James

Alzheimer’s Acceptance – Blog 1 -Introduction

February 18, 2019August 8, 2020James Sweeney

Hello all,

This is going to be the first blog in my new Alzheimer’s Acceptance series. This blog is going to act as an introduction into the series of blogs that will be released in the upcoming weeks regarding this topic.

Acceptance. A single word with hundreds of meanings and hundreds of obstacles. To accept a new reality or a new set of obstacles are things people face in day to day life. This series of blogs is going to focus on the different variables and facts you need to acknowledge and accept in relation to Alzheimer’s.

Alzheimer’s is a very complex and interesting topic that can really be confusing to get your head around. People try to tackle it as one subject and one milestone which has ill-advised effects on both our Mental Health as well as our Physical Health. To even try and understand an illness such as Alzheimer’s as just one entity can ultimately make acceptance next to impossible. To truly acknowledge and accept what is going on in someone’s head and how to cope with it you need to break the condition down into smaller more manageable milestones.

By splitting the problem into smaller manageable milestones, you allow yourself to increase your understanding on a step by step basis, slowly learning and accepting each point as appropriate. This helps your mind make sense of what is going on and allows you to think rationally about the right steps that you need to take. Breaking down the problem eases the pressure on both you and the person suffering. You can slowly understand different bits gradually, instead of having to do it all at once.

Thank you for reading today’s blog! I feel like I am really going to enjoy writing this series as I am going to be able to link my own personal experience in with the topic. If anyone has any feedback on this blog or any other blogs that I have done please do get in touch! If anyone has any suggestions for blogs they want to see or feedback they want to give then please do not hesitate to message me as well!

Thanks as always,

James Sweeney

Learn to walk before you can run

Poetry? A Guide to How to Manage Stress using Poems.

February 12, 2019August 8, 2020James Sweeney

Hello,

If you have read any of my previous blogs, you would have seen that I have quite an interest in Poetry. I like to write poems about topics that interest or stress me out as it helps me manage my problems. In this blog, I am going to be describing how poems help me and how to write them.

Firstly I am going to talk about how poems help me. In times when I am stressed or worried about something I often feel a bit lost. In these times it is common for my stutter to flare up and it becomes increasingly hard to talk to people. It’s in these times that I start writing poems. I find that poems are a great way for me to express how I am feeling at a particular time at a level which is easy to understand.

These poems allow me to directly convey how I am feeling alongside what I want to say without running into obstacles such as my stutter or accidentally phrasing things wrong. I have written poems about almost anything. I have written poems about my stutter, my Grandmothers Alzheimer’s, Mental health and many other topics. I like to always follow a set pattern that I have when I make a poem which becomes evident if you have seen more than one of my poems. I like to always refer back to two lines or a paragraph in a way that is similar to how a chorus is repeated in a song.

Next, I am going to be talking about how to construct a poem. When I make a poem the first thing I need is a topic. After I have chosen my topic I look for particular words that relate to that topic. An example of how to do this can be seen as follows: in my poem about My Grandmother, I chose the topic of Alzheimer’s. From this topic, I picked out several words such as memories, kindness and friend to name a few.

From this step, I start to think of rhyming words for the topical words I have chosen. The number of rhymes for each word can vary based on the style of poem you want to create. I usually create my poem using rhyming couplets, however, I have constructed poems in the past using whole verses full of rhyming words.

If you are having trouble finding rhyming words then there are ways around it. Firstly you can find synonyms to the word that you want to use. When you have found an appropriate synonym you can again try to find a word that rhymes with it. If you are still having trouble rhyming a particular word then you can use a website such as RhymeZone.

The next stage to develop your poem is to group together your rhyming couplets/paragraphs. Try to arrange the paragraphs/stanzas in a way that flows whilst also making sense. You want to present the theme of the poem you are writing about almost instantly to allow the reader to fully understand and appreciate it. To try and maximise the flow of the poem you could repeat two or three lines at the end of the paragraph. This helps to ensure that the poem is easy to follow and easy to read. After following these steps you should have an excellent poem!

Thank you for reading and I hope this guide to how to write poems has been helpful for you. As always any feedback on this blog and all of my other blogs is greatly appreciated! Hope to see you all again soon. If you have any questions or poems that you want me to check to be sure to message me.

James Sweeney

Nobody gets to live life backward. Look ahead, that is where your future lies – Ann Landers

Content Schedule Update – February 2019

February 10, 2019August 8, 2020James Sweeney

Hello,

This blog is going to add as an update blog for the upcoming weeks. I am going to be briefly talking about what I am hoping to do in regards to content in my blogs for the upcoming weeks.

As my blog is still in it’s early stages I think it is important to briefly cover every field that I want to talk about. I will be starting some ‘blog series’ that I hope to carry on in the future.

Over the next few weeks my blogs will be focused around Mental Health, Stress and Stuttering. I am interested in going into University Stress for Students in the future but I am still thinking about how I am going to do this.

This is only meant to be a short blog providing answers for the large variety of blogs that have been released lately. I will be posting a blog sometime this week about how I write poems and how they help manage stress. If anyone has any requests for blogs or questions please get in contact with me.

Thanks for reading and keep an eye out for my future blogs!

James Sweeney

Poem – Looking into the Mind of Mental Health

February 9, 2019November 22, 2021James Sweeney

Looking into the Mind of Mental Health is a poem that I wrote back when I was going through a rather rough patch with my own Mental Health. The poem takes a look at some of the thoughts that can go through your head when thinking of Mental illnesses such as Anxiety, Depression & PTSD.

Here is the poem:

Looking into the Mind of Mental Health

My depression is at an all-time high,

I’m not sure how to fix it, I don’t know why,

Is it worth solving, is it worth a try?

Do I just stop or go to bed and lie?

How do I escape this cycle of self-hatred?

This self-torture mechanism I have created,

When feelings are difficult to be translated,

When all you want to feel like again, is elated.

My anxiety is at quite a high peak,

My mind-sets darkening, turning bleak,

My positivity’s slowly draining, like a boat with a leak,

Is it worth saving, or is my mind too weak?

How do I escape this cycle of self-hatred?

This self-torture mechanism I have created,

When feelings are difficult to be translated,

When all you want to feel like again, is elated.

I’m worried that my PTSD will come back,

Then my social and work life will slack,

One person left alone like a wolf without a pack,

When life gets tough is it worth the hack?

How do I escape this cycle of self-hatred?

This self-torture mechanism I have created,

When feelings are difficult to be translated,

When all you want to feel like again, is elated.

What if the bullying happens again?

Will I cope? Or break like I did when I was ten,

This fear I’ve got, my childhood is the stem,

I’m lost for words, can’t put words to the pen.

How do I escape this cycle of self-hatred?

This self-torture mechanism I have created,

When feelings are difficult to be translated,

When all you want to feel like again, is elated.

Hope you all enjoyed the poem! Let me know what you think!

Thanks for reading and I hope you have a great day!

James Sweeney

Rhythmical Thinking: A Stuttering Solution?

February 7, 2019September 16, 2022James Sweeney

Stuttering is one of life’s obstacles that can prove difficult to overcome. Certain types of people learn methods and techniques to help overcome stuttering, however, others can struggle. I’m going to be doing a series of blogs with methods I use to help reduce the amount I stutter. This method I like to refer to as the Rhythmical Thinking method.

During times when I stutter a lot, I always try a wide range of techniques to help reduce it. When I was younger there was a time when no matter what method I tried, I could not stop stuttering. I struggled to think of what to do and then a thought came to my head. I started thinking of a musical beat in my head. I slowly started to increase the beat when I stopped stuttering and I went back to speaking normally. I’ll go into detail about how this works after I give a bit of a background to how it worked for me.

I’ve been part of a brass band since I was very young. I learned to play the trombone when I was in year 3 in school and am still learning today. As I grew up playing in a brass band I experienced lots of different musical beats, rhythms and tempos/speeds. After playing these pieces hundreds of times you learn how to compose these beats in your own head.

Now how the Rhythmical Thinking technique works is as follows. When you start to stutter a lot you stop and think of a beat. This beat can be as fast or slow as you want it to be however I recommend starting with a slow beat. Once you have this beat in your head you can either just keep it in your head or you can tap your fingers or toes to it.

After the beat has remained constant in your head for a while start speaking in time with the beat. As you start to reduce the amount you stutter slowly increase the beat until you get back to normal. As you increase the speed ensure that you are still stuttering less. If you start to stutter more again then slow down again and try again. This should help you stop stuttering.

Thanks for reading and I hope you have a great day!

James Sweeney

Alzheimer’s: The Bookcase Analogy

February 5, 2019August 8, 2020James Sweeney

The Bookcase Analogy is a theory I first found through a video, which was created by The Alzheimer’s Society . The theory is one of the many theories used to describe how Alzheimer’s affects a persons mind. The Bookcase Analogy is a great way to describe and visualise Alzheimer, as well as the effect that it has on your life.

The Bookcase Analogy is an excellent theory used to describe the affect Alzheimer’s has on a persons mind. The theory starts out like this: Imagine a persons mind as a Bookcase. As you get with every Bookcase, there are several shelves on the Bookcase. In our example each shelve is a decade(10 years).

Now imagine the Bookcase gets damaged. When books fall off the bookcase they are lost and/or misplaced, this is similar to how Alzheimer’s affects the mind. The books in this instance correspond to memories. If they fall off the shelf they are lost or missing. This leaves gaps in the shelves and or memories. This can lead to certain people having to relive the death of a loved one or numerous other tragedies that have happened in their life. This can be very upsetting for the sufferer.

These absences of memories can be very confusing to the person who has Alzheimer’s. These can lead to them having enlarged emotions. What I mean by this is that certain emotions can be amplified by this stress. Sufferers can become very anxious, stressed, jumpy or any other sort of emotion caused by this stress.

Books can also be swapped on a bookcase. This is an excellent way to link a bookcase to Alzheimer’s. The swapping of books can be linked to how Alzheimer’s meddles with people memories. If a bookcase if damaged or the books are swapped it can cause great confusion and can possibly lead to violence not usually seen by some people who are suffering with Alzheimer’s.

This damaging of the bookcase can also lead go the sufferer getting confused about how old they are. People can suddenly think they’re 30 years old when they’re 70 or they could think that they are 80 years old when they are only 40. This confusion can also relate to mood swings. People can get really annoyed that they cannot remember certain memories and it cab lead to them becoming very angry or upset very suddenly. Although these mood swings are usually temporary, they can cause a great deal of unrest for the casualty and of course surrounding family and friends.

Thank you for reading and I hope you have learned something new today. Any feedback on this blog would be appreciated. you can either contact me via the contact form provided on the website or via the Facebook page.

James Sweeney

“It occurred to me that at one point it was like I had two diseases – one was Alzheimer’s, and the other was knowing I had Alzheimer’s” – Terry Pratchett

A Grandmother, Mother and to all a Friend

February 4, 2019January 20, 2023James Sweeney

This is a poem I made for my Grandmother, when I found out that she had Alzheimer’s Disease. The poem is a very personal one for me and can also be located on my Alzheimer’s website, Don’t Forget Me. The poem acts a nostalgia train for me going through my life and the memories that I share with my Nana.

Note: Cap is a nickname that my brother made for my grandfather 🙂

A Grandmother, a Mother and to all a friend,
A person who would inspire you to the very end.

For a person who did so much for so many,
If she needed help she would try not to ask for any,
A nurse for years and a sister to her ward,
If you ever wanted to go for a walk she would be first on board,
A strong lady who could walk for miles,
Would take you up and down the aisles,
A Grandmother, a Mother and to all a friend,
A person who would help you to the very end.

For a Nana who devoted her life to Cap,
She could make a killer bacon bap,
A devoted wife, partner and the very best friend,
The two together were the ultimate blend,
A woman who would help no matter who you were,
Who would help you see clearly if your mind was a blur,
A Grandmother, a Mother and to all a friend,
A person who you would admire to the very end.

For a Grandmother who would go for walks down the beach,
She would always share advice, never to preach,
For all the walking we did on the rocks,
She never thought to comment on my very weird crocs,
For the rock pools we would look for all day,
A task that would need us to go all around the bay,
A Grandmother, a Mother and to all a friend,
A person who would guide you to the very end.

For a woman who could make the very best scone,
Any memories of her will never be gone,
A kind patient and incredible baker,
She would not even tell me off when I was a troublemaker,
A lady who could make the tastiest teisin lap,
She always would let me steal Caps cap,
A Grandmother, a Mother and to all a friend,
A person who would inspire you to the very end.

Thanks for reading my poem dedicated to my grandmother, my best friend, my hero. If you would like to let me know what you thought of the poem, please drop me a message in the comments or through our Facebook page. Although my grandmother’s Alzheimer’s has stole the memories from her, they’ll never take them away from me!

Thanks for reading & I hope you have a lovely day!

James Sweeney