I moved DW to memory care (part 1)

l7pla1w2

This is my (very long) saga of moving DW to memory care, and how we reached that point. I hope you will find it interesting, if not useful.

I used to participate in this forum until a few months ago. Then DW's condition made it impossible. She needed my attention, demanded my attention. I remember reading other people's accounts of putting their LO in MC, and this is mine. Those accounts helped me gain perspective about what to expect leading up to their decisions.

My DW just turned 76. She was a college professor for 30 years. As far back as 2016, she was diagnosed with impaired cognition, and that put me on alert. For the first few years thereafter she suffered gradual declines.

The summer of 2019 was the first sign of serious trouble. DW had always paid our bills and used our bank's Bill Pay service. That summer she was confused about how to do that and said she'd never done it before. She had been volunteering at an organization about 1/2 hour drive from home. She got lost coming home a couple of times, saying she got confused in the dark. (She was never a very good navigator.) Her "boss" there said DW had misfiled things alphabetically in the office. DW was insulted when that was called to her attention and said it wasn't her fault, that she knew how to alphabetize files. At that point she stopped going.

In January, 2021, she had a full neuro-psych eval, and the report said she had Alzheimer's. She bristled at that, said there was nothing wrong with her, that those folks were quacks. She attributed her memory lapses to normal aging: "Everyone forgets things as they get older." However, she has anosognosia and doesn't know she's impaired.

Her condition became more serious over this past summer and into the fall. I had been able to leave her alone in the house until then, but now she became extremely anxious, which meant I couldn't leave her to do my own volunteer activity. In fact, I had to be with her basically 24x7. If she had a doctor's appointment, I had to take her. (She voluntarily gave up driving a few years ago. We never made an issue of it. She would ask if I would drive her, or I would volunteer to do so.) If I had a doctor's appointment, I had to take her along. She was my anchor, and not in a good way.

I had tried taking her to a couple of day programs, but she didn't like them. I tried hiring in-home caregivers, but she rejected them, told them she wanted them to leave. She had become very clingy. I was her security blanket, even though she didn't always know who I was, that we were married, that we live together.

DW's condition seemed to be deteriorating more quickly over the winter and into the spring. Without going into too much detail, there was confusion of place and time;
incoherent speech (using the wrong nouns and verbs); extreme inability to follow directions because she could not identify objects by name and sight; delusions that faculty and students would be coming to our house; and on and on. The repetitive activity that seemed to soothe her was cutting out pictures from magazines or cutting up paper into teeny-tiny pieces. Using the scissors seemed to do it.

It was becoming increasingly difficult to deal with her, and I knew the need for memory care was imminent. I estimate she's in Stage 7. She can feed herself but sometimes needs cuing. For example, she might put salad dressing on the entree or drink it straight. She sometimes put her morning pills, which I put out on a little dish, into her apple juice or onto her cereal.

She is having difficulty choosing clothes, although she can dress herself. Choosing what to wear is exacerbated by the fact that her closet and dresser are a chaotic mess of clothes stashed without much organization.

She is intermittantly incontinent. One day she pooped four times in her (four different) undies. I offered to clean one while she was still on the toilet. I asked her about the poop, and she said someone must be doing that to her. Apparently she had lost the relationship between the poop and her own body.

Being trapped at home, it was hard for me to get any support. I couldn't discuss her condition in her presence because, of course, there was nothing wrong with her. That's why Alzconnected was so important. I could participate without her knowing what I was doing. Anyway, not only could I get no first-hand support, I could not investigate potential places for us or her when the time came.

Fortunately, recently, I was put in touch with Jen, who had extensive experience working with dementia patients. She was able to connect with DW, unlike the other people or groups I tried. (She was also a lot more expensive. You get what you pay for.) She and DW would sit in the kitchen and have conversation and activities that kept DW engaged. Those sessions freed me to look into memory care and sign up at a facility that seemed to be first on the list of recommendations by people I talked to. Fortunately, that facility had space and I was able to place DW within two weeks of first contact.

(See Part 2)