The reality of life as an Alzheimer’s carer

16/06/2007

I suppose thousands of people will tell you their stories relevant to the troubles of J McKerner related in the May Mature Times. Anyway here is mine.

I am 89 in July, a retired project engineer in petrochemicals. In 1990 my lovely and clever wife Mavis started asking me what day it was several times a day and by 2000 she was a complete nut-case with Alzheimer's.  She was an overactive type of sufferer, and remedies then available to lengthen normality were only suitable for the under-active types, so I had 10 years of caring for an increasingly unpredictable over-active stranger.

Why I coped was partly that I believe that we are immortal spirits temporarily encased in earthly bodies and that it was only Mavis's earthly shell that was out of order, so that eventually she would be OK. This belief however doesn't help much in the day to day struggle to be carer, cook, housemaid, gardener, principal viola in two amateur orchestras, secretary, webmaster, father, grandfather and great-grandfather. By April 2000 I was grey, wan and looking like death warmed up. Luckily I had kind neighbours who sat in with Mavis and allowed me to have other interests.

Fortunately, the psychiatric nurse in the Hampshire Mental Health system saw what was going on and arranged for me to have two weeks respite. This was the most traumatic thing in my long life so far. I had to persuade Mavis that we were going for a ride in an ambulance in the New Forest to get her into the vehicle.

Then we went into the Becton Centre at Barton-on-Sea and I had to slip out of the back door whilst Mavis was settled down in the ward for people left there to give respite to their carers. I felt lower than any low life one could imagine. I still do!
I stayed with my elder son in the North-East for two weeks and recovered some of my feeling of well-being, then returned to Ringwood, intending to retrieve Mavis from her incarceration.

The Centre asked me to attend a case conference and the panel decided to section Mavis and told me to book her into a secure nursing home. I knew there was a good private one nearby and booked her in. They said not to visit her for a few weeks.

 

When I visited her, Mavis, or at least her defective earthly personality, she was completely happy in what she then regarded as her own home. She was looked after far better than I could, was always clean and tidy and well fed. I visited her every other day, brought titbits and cut her finger nails just for the pleasure of doing it. Without the persistent worry about what Mavis was going to get up to next I gradually recovered. Mavis died in June 2006.

If Mavis had not gone into secure nursing care when she did I could well have pre-deceased her, leaving a messy problem for my scattered family. So I would say to Mrs McKerner, by all means look after your husband at home as long as your health allows, but don't work yourself to death - that would be no good for anyone: your husband, family, friends or yourself.

George Barker