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Open Your Minds #28: Living With Alzheimer's Disease (Edna, 75, as Told By Her Husband, Elmer, 79) by Karen Lynn Vidra, The Texas Tornado
Friday, January 24, 2003
I sit here at the bedside of my wife of 50 years, Edna, watching her sleep; and I feel nothing but waves of incredible sadness washing over me.
You see, my beloved wife, who is now 75, has Alzheimer's disease, and because of it she has become a shell of her former, vibrant self. She used to be an active part of her community, volunteering her time at soup kitchens every month, volunteering at the local library a few times a week, and sang soprano in the church choir each Sunday. She was beautiful, happy, and loved her life (and cherished her family). For years, she was happy, productive, and successful. Now she lies in a hospital bed, unable to care for herself; and she no longer recognizes her family or me. To her, we are strangers, and she shows no signs that she even knows us. She has to be fed, changed, and diapered, and she is totally dependent on the care of others. She can also no longer walk, and she requires the use of a wheelchair when she IS up.
This all started several years ago, when she first started having lapses in her memory. At first, these "lapses" were minor and were only mildly inconvenient; she only got rapidly worse as time went on, and within a year's time she was habitually wandering off, going only God knows where, and she was not taking care of herself. She would put on short summer dresses in the middle of winter (or would wear gloves, her heavy coat, or hat in the heat of summer), her hair was unwashed and unbrushed, and she really smelled. Yet she seemed oblivious to all these changes in her behavior, and she often blamed her problems on everybody else instead of taking account of her own personal affairs. She saw others at fault for her condition; SHE wasn't to blame. Then came that day when she set the house on fire and nearly lost her life. She had also fallen several times and broke her hip on one occasion.
Since then, she has been living at Golden Acres, which is a nursing care facility for disabled or elderly patients requiring a lot of medical care; and she has deterioated rapidly since that time. Now she is more like a big elderly infant instead of the wife I loved and cherished for 50 years; and it breaks my heart. I remember how she was before she got sick, and I look at her now, and I wonder if her getting Alzheimer's was anything I have done; and I often end up blaming myself for her troubles. I wonder if there was anything more I could have done to prevent Edna from getting Alzheimer's disease, and I wonder if there was anything I could have done to keep her from getting to the point to where she is at at the present time.
I feel as if I am to blame for my wife's problems, and I often cry because I feel as though I have failed her, and I also feel like I have abandoned her when I put her into the Home; and I wonder if she is angry at me for doing this. But I am not in the best of shape myself (I am 79 years old now, and I have arthritis and walk with a cane now), and I just wasn't physically able to care for Edna and her needs; so I really had no choice BUT to place her into Golden Acres Nursing Home.
