Recently I reviewed few case studies of patients of Alzheimer’s disease and the living quality of the patients and their families.
Since that, I have been thinking about few questions: how to live in dignity and how to spare my family affliction if I had Alzheimer syndrome.
When I talked about those questions with my friends, most of them simply said I worried too much. Sometimes they are right, I think about things to much; however I think sometimes it is good to think over few questions for preparation before the time comes. I haven’t had a perfect answer to living in dignity if I suffered from Alzheimer syndrome. Is this topic too serious to talk about?
Well the really good news is that as your dignity deteriorates so does your capacity to realise it.
HG
Not much you can do about it, really. Maybe a living will. By the time you get diagnosed with Alzheimer’s it too late to do anything about it, I think, and as Nursie says, by that time you’re not aware you’re gaga anyway.
And who in your family would agree to not help you or put a pillow over your face or whatever? So there would be little point in a living will, either.
It’s a good thing to discuss, as any number of things can happen. I have an uncle who has an Alzheimer-like condition: it leaves his mental faculties intact, but s-l-o-w-s his physical actions and speech. My god, he’s slow. As long as I can remember, he’s been slow, but the last few years he’s been utterly unable to care for himself. It set in and developed so slowly, and now he’s basically unable to communicate… and yet still there, mentally. He’s been placed in a home to receive 24-hour care, but was daily visited by his wife, until she suddenly died 6 months ago. Now, it’s pretty much impossible to know what his considered wishes are. Who wants that? (On the other hand, tough to know what you’ll want till it actually happens.) 
Thinking it through with those who count can’t hurt.
If you had Alzheimer’s Disease, you would have little to no awareness of your problematic behavior, and you wouldn’t be able to do anything about it by yourself. Your caretaker(s) would have to do what it takes to minimize your indignity and any potentially harmful behavior while attending to your needs. Eventually this would require 24-hour supervision.
Alzheimer’s disease is more than just being forgetful. Forgetting is normal in humans of all ages, and becoming more forgetful with age is not a sign of AD. If you occasionally forget where you put your keys, forget the name of someone you were newly introduced to, have trouble finding your car in a large parking lot, or lose track of who you told a story to and repeat a story to the same person at a later time, usually that’s not cause for concern.
AD goes beyond the above-mentioned forgetfulness. The forgetfulness of AD is severe and debilitating. But they forget that they forget, and they forget about the odd situations they constantly find themselves in, so they’re unaware that anything is wrong. They lose the ability to reason, to think abstractly, to concentrate on a task, and to filter out unimportant stimuli. Eventually all higher-level brain functioning ceases, followed by the loss of lower-level brain functioning, which leads to death. It’s a truly horrifying disease.
To be brutally honest, the only way an AD sufferer can spare their family of affliction would be to commit suicide. But by the time AD becomes noticeable, the sufferer wouldn’t have the presence of mind to do that.
That’s very different from Alzheimer’s: with Alzheimer’s, the person is, within three to ten years of noticeable onset, no longer there mentally. Physically, however, he/she may be fit as a fiddle.
Like I said, it’s an Alzheimer-like condition. Word from the docs is that the mechanism is essentially identical, but location of the damage is different. So say they.