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All your life you’ve never seen a woman taken by a Fleetwood Mac song like this. TikTok user Nicole Petrie’s mother, Cheryl, suffers from dementia — but even in her darkest moments of anxiety, Nicole has found she can still be brought joy by familiar music. “My mother has Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD), and when she …
All your life you’ve never seen a woman taken by a Fleetwood Mac song like this.
TikTok user Nicole Petrie’s mother, Cheryl, suffers from dementia — but even in her darkest moments of anxiety, Nicole has found she can still be brought joy by familiar music.
“My mother has Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD), and when she is having a bad day or moment of confusion, music can almost instantly improve her mood,” Nicole, 25, told Newsflare.
The loving daughter — who is also a model and activist — recently documented her ability to bring her mother out of a dark place using music.
“Hey Google — play Fleetwood Mac, please. Turn the volume up,” says Nicole while stroking her panicked mother’s hand, in a video she posted to TikTok.
The 1975 song “Rhiannon” begins playing — and almost immediately Cheryl transitions from a state of deep agitation to snapping her fingers and gleefully dancing throughout the kitchen.
“Watch to see the magic of music for dementia patients,” Nicole wrote over the beginning of the clip, which has racked up over 639,000 likes on the short video-sharing platform. “Nothing I was saying to help her was working but as soon as the music comes on you can see her whole mood change,” she wrote for the caption.
Cheryl is visibly quite young to have dementia.
“She started showing signs around 2012 when she was 48. It took a couple years after that to get the official diagnosis because the doctors didn’t consider dementia at first because she was so young still,” Nicole said of her mother. “My dad thinks there might have been signs of something wrong as early as 2010, but it’s hard to be sure because it was very unexpected around that age.”
Nicole frequently posts videos of her mother on TikTok, including ones where she riffs on words like TikTok and reacts to Nicole’s follower account and eats rice cakes.
