Martha H

Dear Aileen,

My Mom has AD, and here area few things we began to notice a few years ago:

-she repeated the same question more than once even though it had been answered.
-she began to neglect her personal hygiene.
-she went out in winter with only a thin jacket on.
-she began to forget to take her medications, or to take too many.
-she entirely stopped balancing her check book.
-she began to not know what to do with mail that came in, threw out one important bill and thus almost lost her supplementary health insurance, but saved junk mail. Later she did not look in the mailbox at all.
-she threw out good food, brand new flowers, good clothes, while saving old shabby clothes, odds and ends.
-her clothing, which used to be put away neatly in several dresser drawers and a closet, was now piled up between two dressers, with no rhyme or reason, while the dresser became empty.
-all of her good jewelry disappeared, along with her antique German Christmas tree decorations. She did not remember what she had done with them. (I suspect that some unscrupulous "friend" took advantage of her confusion to relieve her of her valuables.)

Around that time I went to live with her, and took care of her clothes and food, and mail and bill paying.

Later, worse symptoms appeared: she wandered off and got lost. She went out in the night. She woke me up in the night to demand to know who I was and why I was in her house. She could not go out withut getting lost.

She stopped enjoying eating out, complaining about the food and calling it "tough' and sending it back .. it was embarrasing to the rest of the family. Until then she had happily dined out. Later I found out that AD patients have trouble chewing and swallowing.

She took money out of the bank and I never found out what happened to it.

Those are only a few. Some take off their clothes, begin to use curse words, hit their loved ones, scream, spit and claw at those trying to help them.

Mom is now in a good nursing home, and not going to live much longer, due to heart problems and cancer and AD. She is 98.

It has been a long, hard road. I wish you strength as you deal with it.

One thing that really helped me was the concept "One thing at a time."

Love,

Martha