Family Caregivers Walk To End Alzheimer’s Disease

Yesterday I walked in Georgia’s Alzheimer’s Association’s Walk To End Alzheimer’s.  My family and the Jones family joined to form the Family Caregivers Team.  Pictured here is seven of our twelve team members.  Together we were able to raise $2,500 dollars for Alzheimer’s research.  Both of our families have lost loved ones to Alzheimer’s disease so we know first hand how important it is to raise money for Alzheimer’s research.

In the picture above and below, you see us holding flowers we were given at sign-in.  There were three categories of flowers:  yellow flowers if we were walking in support of someone with Alzheimer’s, purple flowers if we were walking in memory of someone who had died from Alzheimer’s and blue flowers if we had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

During the Opening Ceremonies we were asked to raise our flowers if we had Alzheimer’s; raise our flowers if a loved one had died from Alzheimer’s; and raise our flower if we care for or had cared for someone with Alzheimer’s.  Almost every flower was raised for those who had taken care of someone with Alzheimer’s disease.  It was a very emotional and eye opening moment.  Thousands of purple and yellow flowers raised in the air.  YET, so many people in this country have no idea what it means to take care of someone with this dreadful disease.

People of all ages participated in the Walk -  babies in infant carriers and strollers and young children walking beside their parents;  tweens and teens, college sororities and fraternities, young adults and not so young adults.  Everyone had gathered for the Walk To End Alzheimer’s.  As I looked around at some of us (myself included) who were overweight, it was quite apparent to me that we did not walk regularly and would probably have to take an Epsom salt bath when we got home.  But the aches and pains didn’t matter, we wanted to support this very important cause.

This gentleman was quite an inspiration for me.  Can you see his walker in the picture?  By the time I took this picture we had walked about three quarters of a mile and we were on an uphill slope.  This man had a caregiver with him who is off to the side but close enough should he need assistance.  I don’t know if he walked the mile and a half track or the three mile track.  I was just impressed that he participated.

It has been almost a year since I blogged.  After Gladys passed, I just couldn’t seem to find the motivation to write any articles.  This Walk was just what I needed because it gave me something to want to write about.  If you’d like to see all of the pictures I took, you can find them here on our Facebook page.  If you would like to donate, you can do so here on our Alzheimer’s Association Walk To End Alzheimer’s page.

Next year we’re going to try to recruit a bigger team.  Why don’t you form a team where you live?  These walks are going on all around the country.

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Entering a New Phase in Dementia

I think Gladys is entering into another phase of dementia.  For the past two weeks she has been regressing fairly rapidly.  Her movement is much slower, she doesn’t understand some things that she understood just a few weeks ago.  Her memory is shorter and she may ask me the same question three or four times within five minutes.  During the night she used to have accidents once in a while.  Now it’s every night.  This wasn’t a gradual change it was an overnight change.

When I became Gladys’ caregiver I expected some gradual cognitive and dexterity related change.  I know that dementia doesn’t get better, it gets worse over time.  But I expected to see gradual changes, not sudden change.  These changes seem too sudden.  Maybe her medicine needs to be adjusted, maybe that’s wishful thinking.  I don’t know.  We have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow.  Hopefully he can explain what’s going on.

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