Battling Alzheimer

With millions of people around the world caught in its grasp, Alzheimers is a disease whose implications are still being felt. Sneaking in and slowing removing a person’s ability to recall, function and even remember their own family and friends, this condition is a nasty one that can impact not only the affected patients, but also everyone around them. With this in mind, it is very important for people faced with this condition to arm themselves with solid Alzheimers disease information.

Despite or in spite of its widespread reach, there are a lot of myths that surround Alzheimers. While having correct Alzheimers disease information won’t likely provide a family with the solace it might need following a diagnosis, it can help them better understand the condition and what to expect. Separating the fact from the fiction is very important for those who need to make decisions about future care and potential treatments.

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This post discusses unusual behaviors caused by Alzheimer’s disease and how to respond

My mom was up, dressed and ready to go to church.  On the surface, that seems like a good thing.  However, it was Tuesday morning!  But she was determined to go.  She had her purse in hand, coat over her arm and “no” was not an option.

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The terms dementia and Alzheimer’s are often used interchangeably.  In fact, dementia is not Alzheimer’s and Alzheimer’s is not dementia, although, they are certainly related.

For example, let’s say you your stomach is bothering you. You can’t eat much and it’s difficult to drink.  At first you shrug it off and hope you’ll lose a few pounds, but then you try to ignore it and finally attempt to soothe it with over the counter medicines, nothing works.  You call your Dr. and make an appointment. A couple of days later, you find yourself in the Dr’s office.  She asks you some questions, examines you and declares, “You have an acute pain in your stomach.”  You think to yourself, “Uh….duh……tell me something I don’t already know.”

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I find such help from Kris’s blog Dealing with Alzheimer’s, because she can describe so clearly what it’s like to have it, beginning in her 40s. After three years of being turned down, Social Security finally granted her disability benefits. When she first began her blog in 2004, she was still working full-time, but now she spends time as a member of the Early Stage Advisory Group and makes handmade cards, and does other things that a wife and mother (and sports fan) like to do.

Kris says:

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I shouldn’t be surprised by this: according to Alzheimer’s and Dementia, cognitive impairment (such as dementia) is affecting a smaller percentage of elderly Americans today that it did fifteen years ago. HealthCentral quotes the study as saying that these problem affected from 12.2 percent in 1993 and 8.7 percent in 2002.

Now, that doesn’t mean that the number of people with Alzheimer’s disease isn’t increasing. We’re still facing a coming Alzheimer’s epidemic as more people live long enough to show the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. But of those who live long, fewer of them are having problems with their memory.

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The past few days, I keep coming up with ways of coping with Alzheimer’s disease that depend on already having a healthy relationship with the person who has it. If you never had enough respect for that person, or if they never had much respect for you, or if that respect was based on power or abilities that they lack now, that may cause problems with your relationship now. Alzheimer’s may not cause changes in the moral character of the person with the disease. If you’re the loved one of someone with Alzheimer’s, I guess it’s up to you whether it causes changes in your character, for good or for bad.

Perhaps no quality is as important for someone with Alzheimer’s than trust. It’s hard to feel secure in a world that you can’t remember. You need to have someone or something to trust in if you can’t remember where you are, what you’re supposed to be doing, what happened to important people or things.

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Enough people have trouble talking with their grandmothers - or their mothers. Sometimes they don’t know what to talk about, other times they don’t want to talk about the same things you want to talk about. If their grandmothers or mothers also have Alzheimer’s disease, that doesn’t help the situation.

When you carry on a conversation with someone with Alzheimer’s, you can count on them to repeat themselves and to say some things that you may not agree with. “I don’t remember anything they’re talking about. I thought they were the one with the memory problems, not me,” you mutter to yourself.

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When you discover that something is missing from the place where you left it, what do you assume? Most people assume that somebody else moved it. That’s not my first response. My first response is to ask myself if I’m sure that’s where I really left it. I forget things. I know that. I’m not the only one who does it. Time management experts will smile knowingly. Enough people routinely find things by systematically looking in all the usual places that the time management experts can refer me to their handout on the subject.

But what if you discover that nothing is where you left? What if everything has been moved, including yourself? What if you don’t remember how you got where you are, but nobody will let you leave? That’s the common plight of people with Alzheimer’s disease.

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I feel guilty. Here I’m writing for a blog called “Battling Alzheimer’s” and instead of telling you about the newest drugs, or the latest theories, I’m telling you about washing dishes with my grandmother.

But when I look at the research into new drugs and new preventions, and when I remember my grandmother, I keep thinking that a lot of the researchers are all wrong. They look at Alzheimer’s disease as if it were an infection that you can vaccinate against or take a pill for. Most of the solutions they’re promoting require you to put something into your mouth. I don’t think the mouth is the key to Alzheimer’s. I think the mind is.

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My grandmother mostly had delusions when she was sick - except for a persistent delusion that she had been left out of her parents’ inheritance. Usually we was a pleasant lady, with a good sense of humor. For her, dementia meant nothing like I used to think it meant. She was neither a crazed ax murderer, nor a odd duck on the lines of Doctor Demento. You could enjoy being with her, and most of her guests did.

Some of my grandmother’s delusions were related to poor eyesight, if not poor memory. She didn’t remember seeing some things, so she thought they had disappeared. Case in point: her little dog. The fluffy thing slept in bed with her, but the bed was big enough, and her eyesight was poor enough, that she constantly asked about it. If we couldn’t tell her quickly and accurately where it was, she had been known to grab her cane and head down the back steps by herself (remember, she was almost blind as well as wobbly) to look for it. I eventually made a sign for the respite caregivers, which said in big letters (which she still couldn’t read), “WHERE’S THE DOG?” She was happier when she always knew.

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