Alzheimer’s disease, a somewhat awkwardly pronounced disease, is more “crudely” referred to in many parts of China as “Alzheimer’s disease”.
The disease is irreversible and incurable.
Surveys show that there are currently more than 10 million people living with Alzheimer’s disease in China.
This means that about 10 million families in China will get along with this “incurable disease”.
In the past two years, Wu Yan began to frequent police stations – in order to retrieve her father, who was lost.
Her father, Wu Tianzheng, is 76 years old and suffered from Alzheimer’s disease three years ago. After he got sick, his father loved to run out alone more and more.
He once walked alone to a reed swamp more than 10 kilometers from Home and slept there for two days and nights.
After finding out that her father was missing, Wu Yan kept calling him, but he never got through, so she could only search aimlessly like a fly in the dark.
It wasn’t until the next night that Wu Yan finally got in touch with her father.
“I can see the stars and the moon from here, I’m sleeping with the grass roots. “On the phone, the father was not slow.
If you have not taken care of Alzheimer’s disease patients, the above story, no doubt, will make you feel slightly romantic.
However, when Wu Yan and her Family found her father in the endless reeds, he had not eaten or drunk for two days and nights, his clothes were disheveled, his face was yellow, and he did not even have the strength to speak.
The doctor said that if he had been a little later, he would have been dead.
Such a search for Wu Yan has been a common occurrence. The father, who ran out of the house when he moved, seemed to have turned back into an uninitiated child who did not like to be watched and did not like to stay at home.
“That’s how it is when people get old, what can be done? He is my father ah. “Wu Yan said helplessly.
According to the “White Paper on the Lost Status of the Elderly in China” released by the China Institute of Social Assistance, the number of Alzheimer’s disease patients lost each year is estimated to be 211,500. The mortality rate of lost elderly people
The mortality rate of lost elderly people (10.47%) is much higher than the overall mortality rate of lost people (3.7%).
In fact, wandering is only one of the many manifestations of Alzheimer’s disease that plague families, and there is much more to it than that.
“Even though I’ve forgotten you, I haven’t forgotten to love you” is the theme of many articles written about Alzheimer’s disease. In the public eye, this expression somehow casts a seemingly “gentle” veil over the disease.
In fact, it is far more frightening than most people think.
Degeneration
When Changle’s father was 79 years old, he suddenly lost his ability to count.
The doctor asked him to calculate subtraction within 100, but he couldn’t figure it out anymore. The family realized that something was wrong.
Before his retirement, his father was a school principal, but when Alzheimer’s disease caught up with the former Fudan math student, he gradually degenerated into a child with a clear mind.
Despite the caregivers and children taking turns, his mother remained by his side 24 hours a day, dressing him, feeding him and taking him to the bathroom for seven years.
Now, both of them are 86 years old.
My mother often chats with her children, “Your father was a loyal man who took care of me when I was sick, and I can’t give up on him in my old age, not as long as I live. “
But the mother also mentioned more than once that the current state is painful. Before she retired, she was an art teacher and loved to paint Chinese paintings. After her father’s illness, she no longer had Time to put pen to paper, and the trivial care filled all her Life.
Occasionally, when my father was awake, he would say, “I’m dragging you down,” and Changle and my mother would listen with tears in their eyes. But in the blink of an eye, the father turns back into a child who needs constant care.
Impaired judgment and abstract thinking may be the norm for people with early Alzheimer’s disease, but that’s not the cruelest of them all.
If the temporal lobe area of the brain begins to atrophy, the ability to speak quietly disappears from the body, and they begin to tend to use simple words, eventually failing to pronounce a word or phrase and making only meaningless shouts.
Eventually, the person degenerates into a “biologically meaningful person”.
Amnesia
As the nerve cells in the brain fade one by one, the patient may also forget what happened at a particular time and place.
It may be a phone number, a name, or a Marriage.
Doudou’s grandfather began to have trouble with only some words, and his children asked him, “Who is your old partner? “
He would point to his grandmother, “That person. “
But when asked, “Who is your daughter-in-law?”, Grandpa would be silent.
Memory impairment is the most common initial symptom for people with Alzheimer’s disease, who may remember who you are but not recognize you in front of them.
Grandmother at first will be angry, the real kind, “married more than 50 years, said forget! “
But grandpa knew that grandma was important, but he couldn’t remember that she was his partner and couldn’t get the right number.
Later, when grandma was critically ill, grandpa visited the hospital and kept rambling: “You say I’ve never married a daughter-in-law in my life, why not? “
Grandmother lost, but seems to accept everything again, turned to the children and said, “forget good, forget good. “
Soon after, Grandma passed away. The family thought that Grandma would soon forget about her.
But from time to time, Grandpa still opened the door to the house, went to the kitchen, or took a look around the houses, and asked
“Where is that person? “
Change
A sudden change in behavior is one of the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. The once gentle elderly may become irritable and irritable, a change in personality that affects loved ones more directly.
Grandma Gu’s 76-year-old husband suddenly became very concerned about money after the disease. Her husband, who was originally generous, became inexplicably sensitive to all matters related to money.
Once, when Grandma Gu turned on the TV and played with her cell phone, lying on the sofa to relax, her husband snapped off the TV and stormed out, accusing her of wasting electricity by playing with her cell phone and watching TV.
Grandma Gu, who has been taking care of her sick husband for seven years, still feels aggrieved by this.
On another occasion, her partner accused her of not giving him a penny after decades of taking his salary. After talking, she went to sleep in the next room and never came out again.
Grandma Gu was aggrieved and angry, but did not explode.
“Is it useful for you to be angry? It’s useless. Only ignore him and go along with him. “
She knows that her husband is sick, bear with it, this matter can be quickly turned over.
At the end, she reassured herself: “Everything has its cause and effect. What you owe him in your previous life, you have to pay him back in this life. “
More than that, the behavioral disorders of Alzheimer’s disease patients, which include agitation, aggression, and even hallucinations, delusions and dysidentified syndrome, have caught many families off guard.
Huang Yuyan’s grandmother is 87 years old and was diagnosed eight years ago.
As her condition progressed, her grandmother began to fail to recognize herself in the mirror, often talking to herself in the mirror, talking, arguing, singing with the people in the mirror, and even playing a group of people by herself, making a lot of noise.
To make matters worse, the once gentle and kind grandmother became increasingly irritable, kicking in doors, hitting people, and swearing when she was upset.
The nannies she had hired to take care of her had beaten up three of them. In the most serious case, the grandmother threw hot water directly at Huang Yuyan’s mother.
She was so angry that she didn’t eat with her grandmother for several days.
Another time, when she was changing her shoes at the door, her grandmother picked up her high heels and smashed them on top of her head. She saw it in the mirror and ducked, but the high heel hit her shoulder, which swelled up for several days.
Mom was aggrieved that she was always being targeted for taking care of her grandmother, even though she was obviously doing her best. But a few days passed, and she had to do everything as usual, helping the old man with laundry and cooking.
It’s useless to be angry, grandma turns her head and forgets about it. She is sick and does not even feel that she did it.
What happened in Xiaomi’s family was even more embarrassing.
The 86-year-old mother, having delusions of grandeur, accused her nanny of seducing Xiaomi’s father.
The father was surprised at first, puzzled, and patiently explained. But the more he explained, the more agitated the mother became. She shouted at the father and became hysterical.
The father, already a 90-year-old man, could not stand up to his unreasonable mother, and depression broke out, and it took him more than a year to recover.
For a while, Mi decided that her mother was crazy: “The best nanny who took care of her was the one who took care of her.
“The best nanny to take care of her are thinking wrong, how to live the next day? “
Reconciliation
Caring for someone with Alzheimer’s disease is like a long emotional game.
On one end of the scale, it may be the patient’s involuntary ranting and relentless forgetfulness that gnaws away at affection a little.
On the other end, family members struggle to rise from anger, loss and hopelessness to pour emotion back into the patient.
The pull of illness and affection, day after day.
Mi’s father took her mother to a nursing home and cared for her with a caregiver. The other day, her father encouraged her to write love letters to herself, hoping her mother would move her pen more and make some memories. When she is in good shape, my mother will play a song from Butterfly in Liang Zhu at the piano.
More than once, my father said that he would try to exercise and not get ahead of his wife as much as possible.
Grandma Gu feels that having her partner interact more with people can slow down the progression of her disease, so she often has her partner participate in community volunteer activities to get in touch with as many people as possible.
This summer, garbage sorting is in full swing in Grandma Gu’s neighborhood. She told her partner the mantra that pigs can eat the wet garbage and not the dry garbage.
At regular intervals every day, her old companion, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, appears on duty in front of the garbage room on time, waiting for someone to talk to him.
(Changle, Doudou and Xiaomi are pseudonyms.)
Alzheimer’s disease, which often occurs in old age, is a degenerative disease of the central nervous system. Currently, there is no effective cure.
At the beginning of the disease, family members often mistakenly believe that the patient is just “old and confused” and often do not pay attention until the symptoms become obvious.
After the age of 60, it is important for loved ones to pay attention to subtle changes, such as not being able to recognize the names of acquaintances, forgetting recent events, getting lost in familiar places, and becoming irritable.
Early detection, intervention and treatment cannot reverse the progression of the disease, but they can slow it down.
After the age of 65, the prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease essentially doubles every five years. Elderly people with the disease are advised to wear a locator to prevent loss of contact and wandering.
Patient care and emotional support from family members can greatly affect the quality of survival of patients and can enable them to live a more comfortable and dignified life.
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