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Man, this rings a bell. My dad had/has dementia and got tagged with it the same time my mom was dying in the hospital from a number of ailments. The way their life fell apart all at once --- get sick, pull a subprime mortgage ot pay some bills, get sicker, go on dialysis, get evicted, die --- was like a textbook representaiton of a politician's speech about the dangers of getting sick in America.

The confusion, the randomness, the wandering --- having a parent with dementia is like being an investment banker but with negative payoff. At any given moment my phone would ring and it would be like "We don't know where your dad is everyone needs to go start looking for him." We eventually sewed a GPS into his jacket, but even than was more of a bat signal than an actual solution. He'd go off at literally any hour - I don't think there's an interval on the clock thatwe didn't end up having to drop everything to go comb the streets for him. If only the child locks (or the dementia) had been slightly more effective.

Finally getting him checked into "the system" (a geriatric psych ward) was straight up Old Testament. I'd gotten him in for evaluation via the ER but he kept trying to leave. The doctors were like "We can't keep him here for tests against his will so if he walks out under his own power we have to let him go." This ended up with me standing in the threshold of the hospital doors like Dick Butkus, wrestling my extremely confused but extremely fit father to the ground three times before he finally gave up the ghost and met with an evaluator.

Anyway, just a brutal subject. Charlie Pierce has a good book on it called "Hard to Forget" but generally speaking I think it's really just too horrifying for anyone to talk about with full sincerity and earnestness

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Jun 8, 2019Liked by Luke O'Neil

Both of my husbands parents had Alzheimer’s. It’s just a long slow motion nightmare. I can’t imagine how a group of people realize they might have something that could help a lot and just decide to shove it a drawer. That should be a criminal act.

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This was a tough one. My grandmother suffered through Alzheimer's and by the end she didn't remember her husband dying, then she didn't recognize my dad or aunt, then she didn't remember her husband at all. Which might've been a small mercy, for us at least, because then we didn't have to lie to her anymore about where Irby was, since telling her that he had died was like her finding out for the first time.

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