I don't want to scare you but my mother had Alzheimer's and it started out much the same way. She was living alone in her home for a few years after my father died and often expressed concern about being alone. Other than slight memory problems which I simply thought was due to her age (75), she sure seemed to have a good mental focus. I lived quite a distance from her at the time, so I didn't get a clear picture of what was going on, I guess. One day, I was takling to her on the phone and she sounded very nervous, saying "they need to talk to me, so I have to hang up now." I didn't feel right about this but still couldn't figure out what was going on. Two days later, I received a phone call from my mom's neighbor. I was told that she was in the hospital and couldn't imagine why. It turns out that my mother had been pounding on the neighbor's door, frightened as can be, telling them to "get the people out of her house!" In her mind, there had been groups of "faceless" people (adults and children) who had been in her home, doing little more than walking around or sitting down. The diagnosis was "senile dementia" (which later became Alzheimer's). Once this episode faded away and I had gone home to stay with my mom, things seemed back to normal and she didn't seem to worry about anything. Several weeks later though, I woke up from my mom pounding at my door, yelling "Please, tell these people to get out of my house!" Unfortunately, that was the start of many such frightening events which finally ended up having her placed in a nursing home. I did all I could to keep her at home, including a live in nurse, but the decision to take her away was the hardest and saddest I ever had to make.
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