You have to laugh

The other day a patient identified herself as Mrs - let us say - Johnson, so I asked if she had any children.  She laughed.  "Oh no, I'm not that old."

I'm wondering if she'd taken my question to mean "have you had any children recently" and meant to say in effect "do I look young enough" but it came out the opposite.

Which sheds some light on my dad's comment earlier today; I said I would drop him close to the supermarket entrance and then find a parking space, to which his reply was "that might be easier than you think" but in a tone of voice that  implied the opposite.  He may have been intending to say "easier said than done" but it didn't come out right - the pwd's vocabulary is always letting the side down.  You have to listen to the tone of voice rather than the actual words; and as the condition intensifies you often find yourself responding to the emotion in the patient's utterances with words that make no more sense to you than to him/her, and it doesn't matter.  It's almost like making music with them, an exchange of feeling rather than thought.

So what do I make of this one?  Responding to my lively demeanour on the ward - I'd been having a laugh with one of the healthcare assistants, this old chap said "there are some people who just bounce around, I don't know why.  Are they Welsh?"  I said "I don't think so - I bounce around sometimes and I'm not Welsh."  "Oh well," he said, "that's some consolation."

On the face of it, that's straight out of Reeves and Mortimer.  But the man was trying to communicate something, and maybe it was: whatever quality it is that makes people "bounce around" might not be one that you would wish to have.  But you don't have it, so that's good.  To be Welsh is to be foreign, in some way alien, and I'm not, I'm "normal".  I might be over analysing the language here.  Reduced to its basic emotions, our conversation went: Old man: something is puzzling me.  Me to old man; Well you needn't be puzzled, everything is fine.  Old man:  Thank you, that's kind.

But it was still a wonderfully bizarre moment.