The brains damaged by Alzheimer's desease in
comparing with,  healthy brains.

I now know and understand Alzheimer began developing for my wife 6 or 7 years ago, i.e., in 1996-1997. But shall you run to see a doctor after you get once lost in a town. I though…. This is the time for us to admit that we got old and that such ridiculous stories in our age must be simply a norm….
I got really frightened at the end of 1999 when a granddaughter came to visit us. In the morning my wife asked: “Whose girl has been sleeping with us?”

The diagnosis was made in 2000.
 

At the beginning I was pity for her, it was very hard, and I could hardly imagine that it may become so unbearably difficult.
 

She can neither dress nor undress herself. Somebody has to wash her, feed her, to launder, wash and clean several times a day… She cannot find a toilet. One has to take her there, help her take off her clothes, watch after her so that she did not wash her face with closet water…She neither reads, nor knits, not watches TV, she does absolutely nothing… Does lies on the bed, walks… Every few minutes she keeps asking the same questions, seems as if the hundredth time. For example: “Why do not we go today?”
 

She has panic fear of isolation. When there was time when I dared to leave her by herself for an hour or two, I would find her on the balcony screaming and trembling. Nearly every day she would

get prepared for “going home”, “to her mother’s”, who died 18 years ago. I carefully look after the keys of our  apartment, but she would nevertheless seize them, and run away… When a wish like this comes to her in a store, it is even worse – she bewares of cars not a  jot. You would keep her by her arm, try to turn her back, home – she would begin screaming for help. Half a year ago, when I caught her near St. Peter’s and Paul Church, and tried to stop her, take her home, I hardly escaped away from a gaggle of women, who ran up to her to help her….

She neither can wait for me outside in a corridor, when I go to see a doctor – I simply do not know what I will do later.
Our daughters are of little help – both have families and they work. Furthermore, my wife hardly recognizes them, and does not want to be with them. It sometimes happens, she neither recognizes me; she most often treats me as her father, who left the family when she was a small girl: “You did not take care of me when I was small, you know come, probably have run out of money?..” She would call our neighbors for help, would begin fighting… One night I had to call the emergency for psychiatrists.
 

I tried to find a nurse. Failed. They say, call us when she will be in the wheels, or she will only be able to lie on the bed… The Center for Psychic Diseases no longer allocates the medication titled “Aricept”,  the only one as if curing. They say, it makes no sense.

Did the medication help; how effective “Aricept” was? Who can tell now what it would have been like if we would we would have not taken it at all? The medication was probably most needed at the very beginning, when we did not know that it was Alzhimer….

One cannot let the invalid, the sick person, out of his eyes the entire 24-hour a day – one has to take care of her, and beware of her. If the disease called “Alzheimer” is a “road backwards”, “a disease of leaving the life”, we thus have returned to the age of a 2-3-year-old child. Maybe even further. I keep saying “we”, because I sometimes feel like I myself begin “going backwards”!

Patient’s husband, Vilnius