Symptoms in LS Alz

TK67

My 77 yold mother is in the early stages of late stage Alzheimers.  I have a question about the progression of the disease and symptoms.  Tell me what you know/what you've experienced and what more we can expect from this point on.  We have mom on palliative hospice care.  The nurse comes once a week and she doesn't really talk to me about the symptoms or what we can start to expect.  

having trouble dressing herself

can still toilet on her own but having difficulty

falling often despite having a walker (she forgets to use it)

can barely get herself up out of a chair

shakes/trembles in whole body but especially hands/head

slurred speech but we can still understand most of what she says

not sure of sights and sounds, always asks what is that?

chokes occasionally, even on water

doesn't always seem to understand us

cries often to go home or expects her parents to come get her from my home (mom lives with me)

Thank you!

Cynbar

You can expect all these symptoms to get worse, but every patient is different so it's hard to predict a timeline. She will have more trouble dressing herself, have more trouble getting to the toilet and will probably need Depends, eventually lose her ability to walk and will need a wheelchair, and so on. Everything gets weaker.  The agitation of wanting to go home is very common, there are medications that can help that, ask your hospice nurse if she isn't on something already. However, oftentimes something else occurs that accelerates end of life. She could fall and break a hip, despite your best efforts, or develop aspiration pneumonia , both if which are hard for a frail dementia patient to recover from. We all wish that we could have some certainty about the path ahead, but unfortunately we can't. That is probably why the nurse isn't being more forthcoming.