I lost my dad to Alzheimer's in 2001 and there are still times the pain is so raw it takes my breath away. 

While I know that no two cases of any kind of medical issue are the same, I thought I share a little about my experience with my dad, on the off chance that something resonates for you.

He was 68 years old when he had double knee replacement surgery. He came out of the recovery room violent, to the point they had to use restraints (and this is the man who never even spanked us as kids). He was hallucinating that he was back in the Navy & had been taken hostage, and it took a good long time coming out of it. For the weeks he was hospitalized to rehab his knees, it was like he'd been hit with advance stage dementia literally overnight. I visited every day, and brought him a printed out page that told him what the date was, why he was in the hospital, his nurse's name - things like that, to help keep him centered. The nurses told me they found him constantly, clutching the page and reading it aloud, as if he was trying to memorize it.

By the end of his knee rehab, he'd recovered about 90% of his memories and almost seemed his old self again. About a half year later, I had my first baby and spending lots of time with her (my husband & I were both working for dad's alarm monitoring company, so we were around a ton), helped him focus. Then one day in November, my mom noticed him wandering around their studio apartment, and asked what was wrong - he answered, "Can you help me find my wife? I've looked everywhere and her car is outside, but I don't know where she went." Mom honestly thought he was making a bad joke, until she realized how upset he was.

By the end of the year, we'd had to have him hospitalized in the local psychiatric ward because he became violet again. Strangely (or maybe not) enough, he was only acting out at home, when he got frustrated at not remembering who we were, where he was - any time he was at the hospital surrounded by medical staff, he'd calm down, since he seemed to understand he needed care. He was always a very proud, self sufficient, old school head of the household kind of guy, so I think having us needing to care for him triggered shame, which came out as rage.

Luckily one of my older sisters was the charge nurse at a local nursing home, and we were able to get him placed despite the anger issues. While the Alzheimer's progressed quickly (he was nonverbal inside of a year), his health was the best it had been in years - he was able to walk without pain, and spent the next 6 years essentially pacing the halls of the locked ward in between visits from us. I'll skip the part where one of the last lucid things he said to me was, "You're a good shot, and you know where I keep mine. Don't let me be a burden..." 

He was stubborn to the end - we got the call mid December of 2001 that he'd stopped eating and drinking, so they were going to keep him comfortable but they didn't expect he'd last much longer. Of course, this happened just as my maternal grandmother passed after a short stint in the hospital - how my mother made it through that is beyond me. However, it wasn't until the 31st, when my younger sister went to visit him (I was living an hour away at the time, and had 3 little ones by then) and not too long after she held his hand and said goodbye, he finally let go. It's like he knew she needed that moment with him, and he was waiting for her.

Speaking of my mom - she just lost her sister (my godmother) almost exactly a month ago, and because of the Covid restrictions, she wasn't able to visit her at the assisted living facility she'd been in for a few months, after the doctors gave her weeks to live (not too long after losing her daughter to cancer - never rains, right?). My sister was able to do a Skype call between them (she became Aunt Mary's daughter-by-proxy after cousin Heather asked her to take care of her mom after she was gone) and mom said it helped, but it wasn't the same. She's told me the only thing getting her through this is her grand & great grandkids. 

And now I almost feel bad for writing such a long reply... 😜 To wrap it up, I will simply say that you have an extremely strong moral compass, and an incredible solid center, so I have no doubt you will weather this horrific situation (and the polite part of my brain wants to find a nicer word, but there's no way of expressing how truly awful this disease is) and come out all the stronger. Sending all the good thoughts I can muster, and know that we'll hold the fort down here while you put your oxygen mask on and breath.