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A Nebraska son's notes on Alzheimer's disease
My name is Glen Teigen. I'm 54 years old and I've carried a rural mail route out of Kearney, Nebraska, for twenty-six years. My wife Carol and I have been married thirty-one years. Our kids are grown and gone. Since March of 1998, my mother, Irma Teigen, has lived with us. She is 81 and she has Alzheimer's disease.
I'm not much of a writer and I'm new to computers. Our son set this up for us over the Fourth of July and showed me how to type in the HTML. I'm doing it because when Mom was diagnosed I didn't know one other man taking care of his mother, and I figured there had to be some. If you're one of them, hello.
You can read about Mom and who she was before all this. She'd want you to know her that way first.
Looking back, there were signs for a couple of years. She'd tell the same story twice in one visit. She let bills go. She quit making her kolaches and said she'd lost the recipe, which she'd made from memory since 1940. We figured that was just getting older.
Then in October 1996 she drove to church, the same church she'd gone to for fifty years, and ended up forty miles away in a town she didn't recognize. A highway patrolman found her at a gas station and called me. She was scared to death and ashamed, and that was the worst part.
Her doctor ran a lot of tests first. Some things that look like Alzheimer's can be treated, like thyroid trouble, a vitamin shortage, depression, or a reaction to medicines, so they checked all of that. When those came back fine, and after a long memory test and a brain scan, he told us it was most likely Alzheimer's.
Mom still knows me most days. Some days she thinks I'm my dad, and I've learned to just go along with it. She can't cook anymore or be left alone, and she can't remember what she had for breakfast, but she can sing every verse of every hymn she learned as a girl. Her doctor says that's common, that music stays a long time.
She takes Aricept. The doctor was honest with us. He said it may help some people with some symptoms for a while, and it doesn't stop the disease. I think it helped her some the first year.
Late afternoons are hard. She gets restless and upset and wants to "go home," even though she's sitting in a house she's visited a thousand times. The doctors call this sundowning. What helps us is turning on the lights before it gets dark, keeping things quiet, and getting her out on the porch swing with a glass of lemonade and some old gospel records on.
Two days a week she goes to an adult day center in town. Carol and I felt guilty about it for a month. Now we know Mom likes it there, they have a piano, and Carol gets two days to herself. Carol does most of the caregiving while I'm on my route, and I want to say right here that she is a saint, and that I know it.
If you'd like to write, especially other sons and husbands taking care of somebody, I'd be glad to hear from you. I read e-mail at night after Mom's asleep.
You are visitor number
since July 1999
Last updated Thursday, September 16, 1999
Glen Teigen, Kearney, Nebraska
