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I'd like to post this topic for several reasons: I don't think that the overall population knows much about this, except those whose families are touched by the disease. My maternal grandmother, and my uncle (same family) both died with this horrid affliction. I have also as a nurse, taken care of several people in nursing homes with the same. It is a disease which takes a long time, like 15 years, in my uncle's case, to progress downwards, and the person who is the caregiver is run through the wringer, so to speak. The patients are eventually taken to a nursing home, when the family cannot manage them at home anymore. They actually need to be on a locked unit. Patients run away, while they can still walk around, & you might hear on TV news, about someone who is lost, & they have people searching for them. My grandmother, for example, got up in the middle of the night, in a snowstorm, and they found her in a ditch, with her arm broken...this while she was taken care of at her son's home. In those days, they called this "senile dementia." And that is the same son who later developed Alzheimer's. My mind is on this because I watched a movie yesterday on our Independent Film Channel, called Away from Her, which starred Gordon Pinsent, & Julie Christie, and Olympia Dukakis. It was done in Canada, but evidently is out all over now. If you have a chance, please watch it. The Alzheimer's was slightly "glamorized", but some of it was right on. My ex-husband's wife is now an Alzheimer's patient. I don't think she has been admitted to any units yet. Joan
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Re: ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE
My next door neighbours mother in Scotland had this condition. She would take it her mind to go out for a time but would forget to take her keys with her so often popped round to my place to ask me to phone her daughter to let her back into the house. Things of course got steadily worse and eventually she had to be put into a home. Mind you all the young folk that worked for me were very kind and would make her a cup of tea and talk to her while we waited for her daughter to come home.
Alastair
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