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.

Security on our streets begins when we flick a switch

Finding security on Shepparton’s streets seems pretty straightforward – it begins with the flicking of a switch.

It is unlikely your
 television has a
  switch anything like
 this one, but if it had,
 then moving it to the
 off position initiates
 security on our streets.

However, that is reductionism taken to its extreme as the sought after security arises from a social paradigm of such complexity that it makes brain surgery look artless.
Safety on Shepparton’s streets, as is the case for any town or city, begins when we reach for the remote, turn off our televisions and effectively remove from our lives the programmed violence and its daily assault on human values.
We are born as empty vessels and as our lives take shape we are filled by the influences of those around us, the way of life of those who raise us and the philosophies and values of the institutions that impact on our lives, from our schools, the government, laws, the media and finally, and critically, our entertainment.
Television is unchallenged as the one form of media that has almost unimpeded access to our lives, influencing our values from the seemingly impossible cheery morning shows and attention grabbing frivolities throughout the day, to the early evening news and current affairs shows that pander to the corporatism of the world, and the endless blood, gore and drama of evening viewing that ignites and excites our emotions.
Television simply fills up all the emotional holes in life to make the road smooth, but in a strange contradiction it is also hardening our values making us less conscious of community and consequently less willing to step away from our addiction to support our fellows.
And so while the road is smooth it leads to nowhere, at least not to a place where our streets are secure.
Television seeps almost unknowingly into our consciousness, while newspapers, books and magazines demand a more active participation and leads readers into a line by line contemplation and judgement that encourages reflection.

Neil Postman

Being aware of our ever-reducing attention span, television doesn’t allow for such luxuries, hurrying from scenes of war, death and destruction to heart-warming images of a team of rescuers hauling a helpless horse from a bog.
This seamless shift from tragedy and scenes of human deviousness to images of human goodness confuses the intellect and as discussed by Neil Postman in “Amusing Ourselves to Death”, we become desensitized to death and other human difficulties.
That, aligned with a violent computer games and movies in which violence is celebrated, tells the viewers/participants that whatever troubles them can be resolved by bellicose behaviour and so as night follows day, aggression, in its many forms, stalks our streets.
Modern life has conspired with the liberty afforded by our streets to rob them of the what it is those public places allow, a social life that has the wonderful addendum of security.