Dementia Care Without Medication: How a Pot Holder Started Geri-Gadgets With Angela Fairhurst

What finally reached her mother after four years was already in her kitchen drawer.

Angela Fairhurst had brought her mother children's toys. They were infantilizing. They were too complicated. Crayons became lipstick, because in dementia a crayon stops looking like a crayon. Nothing was dishwasher safe, and nothing was safe in the mouth. Her mother was agitated, kicking and biting at her care home, and Angela was afraid she would be asked to leave. Families listening to this know the feeling of running out of options for a parent while everyone around you starts using the word placement.

Robbyn Battles has spent more than 38 years in residential real estate as a Broker Associate specializing in senior home transitions, trust sales, and inherited property, work that put her in the RealTrends Top 1% of agents nationwide. She is usually in the room a step later, when a parent's decline turns the house into the thing the family has to decide about. Angela is what happens a step earlier. She cut down a square silicone pot holder, brought it to her mother, and watched her pat it and throw it back and forth like a Frisbee. Her mother had lost language years before. For the first time in four years, she was present. That mat became Geri-Gadgets, a line of dishwasher-safe, food-grade silicone kits now in a New York State Office for the Aging pilot across 12 adult day and disability service sites. Angela walks through why there is no red anywhere in the line, why touch is one of the last senses to go, and what she means by an acronym she uses constantly: DARE, don't argue, react, or explain. She also lands the biggest win of her career the day before this taping, when Stanford signs on to help her prove what she has been watching happen in live sessions for years.n