Saving Dad Options

[Lasthorseman]

So Dad is 87 with alzheimers. He is still a gentle soul who wants to die in his own home. For the most part there is help available for this, in fact elder care is a huge industry unto itself. This brings up complex issues and huge emotional stress for caregivers and the families. I have been fortunate to express my opinion of not wanting Dad "In an institution" and yes feel free to use those words for like everything else these nursing homes are the same downsized business model of capitalist crap like everything else. My wife has worked in said industry for well over 20 years and I can attest to crappy business models destroying once top rated institutions. Moral declines and the good people move on to the newly built more yuppie nursing home, most times with a general loss of benefits and rewards for long time excellent performance and service.

I can only advise the rest of my baby boomer generation to prepare for this event as it will hit you like a freight train. You may find your preparations are inadequate once you get there and I am beginning to suspect this too is by design. It is this double edged sword always. Think of all the wonderful things dedicated medical professionals do but then contrast that with the proposals of police road stops for the now past swine flu pandemic. Tell me that wasn't profit motivated. Swine flu is gone, yet the Purelle dispensers remain.

[lunk]

Tough stuff.
i was fortunate enough to be able to stay with my Dad, through his last days.
we had a health care worker come in for a few hours each day, to help.
This was a good thing, it gave me and mom,
a little more time to get other necessities done.

Home is home.

[albertchampion]

i am not intending to be argumentative, but how do you know the form of dementia your father is experiencing is alzheimer's syndrome?

i ask you this because alzheimer's has become a shorthand for all the various forms of dementia. if you would be interested, i could identify almost all of them for you. and the reason that it is important to identify the true cause of the dementia is that some forms are, if not reversible, arrestable. had i known more about dementia before it degraded my mom's cognition, i have concluded that i might have been able to arrest the progression of her dementia.

i have had some experience with caring for a parent with some form[s] of dementia. and you are right about one thing, for the care giver[s] it is a life changing situation. and radically so. i call the 9 years that i cared for my mom my lost years.

to conclude this interjection, i think it mandatory that it be recognized that there is a form of dementia that is caused by alzheimer's syndrome, but there are many other causes of dementia. and i think it to be important to recognize this. if you would like to continue a dementia discussion, i would be more than willing to participate. i learned so many things years ago that i might be of assistance to you.

[Lasthorseman]

Albert
I know there are many reasons for dimentia. Yes, Dad has been seen by the best in Boston and is currently in a very good adult day care program. He can't process or retain new information. What day it is, the news, it is all irrelevant as he does not remember. Today however he did put a smile on my face. He was alert enough to steal the brownies my mother made for me.

[albertchampion]

ok,

sounds like where i was some years ago. my mom was diagnosed with alzheimer's syndrome by the best in houston. and houston is a medical center every bit the equal of boston.

she was doing very well in an assisted living facility until she was assaulted by another resident[broken hip, broken wrist]. that dropped her from 90% on a cognition level to 10%-20%. that is when my life changed.

i thought i was very fortunate to get her into a very special dementia unit headed by a famed neurologist. at some point, the bad baptists merged with the good baptists, and the bad baptists took control of the good baptists who had established this dementia unit.

let me just say that at some point, i discovered that the famed neurologist and the bad baptists were taking money from pharma to administer psychoactive drugs to the patients, without authorization. they were killing her. and in retrospect, accelerating her dementia.

with a court order, i moved her from houston to LA. where she was baselined by a special UCLA dementia unit.

very educational and disturbing experience. looking at the same cranial mri, where houston medicos diagnosed alzheimer's, the ucla medicos saw that the cause of the dementia was vascular in origin. and more to the point, they identified the psychoactive drug cocktails that she was being subjected to as aggravating the dementia.

the most extraordinary crime that i encountered is that there is no national registry for dementia. so, in other words, in what might be a large percentage of victims, there is no relevant record of the cause of the dementia. it is all anecdotal. and what do i mean by that? i mean that upon my mom's demise, her cause of death was pneumonia. signed off by her physician, therefore, no autopsy. and that is the case with almost all who die while suffering from dementia.

though some medicos deny it, only a post mortem cranial dissection can identify the form of dementia. and in most circumstances, no such examination is performed.

even when a family might want one performed. and there is another crazy story. if you would be interested in hearing it.

suffice it to say that my research concluded that most dementia is not the result of alheimer's.

i found that the major culprits were of vascular, endocrinal, nutritional, bacterial origins.

a story that i think would be confirmed had there been, were there, a dementia registry.

[lunk]

i have a neighbour who was suffering all sorts of health problems,
bone loss, forgetfulness, she was on a medicine cabinet full of pharmaceuticals,
she shrunk 3 inches in 6 months.
Then they did a thyroid test,
and discovered that this, was the cause of all her symptoms.
And all the pills she was taking were just for those symptoms,
not the thyroid problem. This was corrected with a single medication.
She is fine now, and has a mind like a steel trap.
Funny though, she used to be taller than me.