Living and coping with the challenges of Alzheimer's disease

Australia’s ageing population brings many riches, but they do not come without a cost.

Old age offers much, but
brings many complications.

The knowledge and wisdom of the baby boomers, now mostly in their sixties and beyond, is being lost with Commonwealth Government statistics showing that about 250 000 people in Australia have dementia.
Dementia, the government’s Department of Health and Ageing has said, is not a natural part of ageing and there are many different types of diseases and conditions that cause dementia-like symptoms.
After the age of 65, it adds, the likelihood of being diagnosed with dementia doubles every five years and people over the age of 85 currently have a one in four chance of developing dementia.
The financial cost to Australia is huge and growing, but the unmeasured cost is the physical hurt and emotional pain imposed on carers and others supporting those who actually have dementia.
Dementia is triggered by many diseases, and among them is Alzheimer’s disease, which worsens the functioning of a person’s brain impacting on such things as such as speech and language, personality, decision-making and judgment or awareness and ability to interact with the environment.
Difficulties arising from a brain whose capacities are being eroded have become intimately familiar in the past decade with first my mother-in-law dying from complications associated with Alzheimer’s disease and now my father-in-law, although in his late 80s, is wrestling with the same adversities.
He is a beautiful man (I accept my familial biases), honest, loyal, generous, courteous and in every sense a gentleman.
Those qualities still exist and were evident when his daughter, my wife, and I cared for him for about a week just recently.
It was a lovely, but sad, time – Basil was a wonderful houseguest during which time it was important to focus on the moment and not think too much about him once being the efficient and effective manager of the Echuca livestock saleyards.

My father-in-law
 managed events such as this
 two or three times a week.

He had once, two or three times a week, orchestrated sales involving hundreds of animals, co-ordinating their sale, movement within the yards and, ultimately, their readiness for transport by the buyers.
Alzheimer’s disease has been the formal diagnosis and steps have been taken to slow its onset and although they have been effective to some degree, the side-effects, occasionally, have been unwelcome.
Patriarchs are often portrayed as the rock upon which families depend and the mental deterioration of one shouldering that responsibility brings a seismic shift in family dynamics.
His authority, seemingly suddenly erased by the disease, has shifted what were once his responsibilities to his children bringing convoluted undercurrents that are worsened by the complexities of emotions arising from these chaotic times.
The raw cost to society through the loss of a valuable member is measurable, but not so the unsettling confusion surrounding that loss.