Words Of Caution For Alzheimer’s Patients’ Families
Rosan Alvey learned the hard way. Alzheimer’s disease slowly destroyed her father, then stole her mother as well.
There wasn’t much anyone could do for her father, Joe Thuet. But Rosan saw the toll his disease took on her once-healthy mother, Rose, who insisted on caring for Joe alone.
“Mom gradually declined,” Rosan says. “She was no longer her - not the outgoing, interesting person she had been.”
Eventually, Rose ended up in a nursing home sharing a room with Joe. The diagnosis was Alzheimer’s disease.
Rosan couldn’t change the course for her family, but she’s trying to reach other families in North Idaho to save them some heartache.
“That’s my mission,” she says firmly.
Joe was 75 going on 40 when he caught a food-borne illness on a trip to Mexico eight years ago. His 105-degree fever put him in intensive care for nearly two weeks and killed some of his brain cells. Doctors told the family the trauma triggered Joe’s Alzheimer’s.
“He made a good recovery,” Rosan says. “But his mind just wasn’t the same after that.”
Rose was 67 and busy. She was an official observer of the Utah Legislature for various organizations and sat on various Salt Lake City boards. But she dropped it all to care for Joe.
Rosan visited often and nagged her mother to go out, to hire help. Rose insisted she didn’t need help.
“Dad didn’t want her working around the house,” Rosan says. “He wanted her there with him all the time. The TV and the dog became their entire lives.”
As Joe grew weak and less lucid, Rose began hallucinating, seeing people on her steering wheel, in Rosan’s pocket.
In 1993, Joe fell, broke his hip and moved into a nursing home after he left the hospital. Rose was so worn down from years of caring for Joe that her brain never bounced back. Last year, she joined him in the nursing home.
“Doctors say it was too big a burden. It contributed to her decline,” Rosan says.
Rosan, who lives in Coeur d’Alene, joined the Alzheimer’s Association two years ago to warn families of Alzheimer’s patients to get help or risk their own health.
She speaks from experience.
The Northern Idaho chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association will hold its Memory Walk on Oct. 5 along Lake Pend Oreille’s shore in Farragut State Park. Walkers will raise money through sponsors for the association’s educational materials and programs. To register, call 664-5681.
Wrong number
A telephone call to Coeur d’Alene’s Yvonne MacDonald two weeks ago has kept her on the run. The caller was in Australia and looking for a girlfriend from her school days 30 years ago in Coeur d’Alene.
The information operator gave the woman Yvonne’s number even though the woman had asked for Ann MacDonald’s number. The caller wanted to reunite with Ann during a visit to the United States next month.
Yvonne couldn’t help her, so the woman hung up. But Yvonne couldn’t stop thinking about the woman’s search. She called another MacDonald she knew, eventually found Ann’s mother and learned that Ann lives in Gig Harbor, Wash.
Great news - except Yvonne doesn’t know how to find the caller from Australia.
Super mom
Stop fretting. State Treasurer Lydia Justice Edwards has extended the deadline for Idaho’s Mother of the Year contest to Feb. 1, apparently because she has received few nominations.
Come on, North Idaho - show some pride. Let’s bury Boise in nominations. For applications, write to the Statehouse, Room 102, Boise 83720, or call (208) 334-3200.
What makes your mother so special? Before you send her name to Boise, boast about her to Cynthia Taggart, “Close to Home,” 608 Northwest Blvd., Suite 200, Coeur d’Alene 83814, or send a fax to 765-7149, call 765-7128 or send e-mail to cynthiat@spokesman.com.
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo