Live in care at Home – Elderly home care blog

It is not at all unusual for even the most hardened individuals to be overcome by the trauma of coping with a loved one who has Alzheimer’s Disease.

The upset displayed by John Suchet is a prima facie illustration – albeit a particularly harrowing one – of the feeling of desolation and isolationism that we as a company see only too often when people initially approach us for help in dealing with this condition.

Hugely helpful as the Admiral Nursing initiative is, as Mr Suchet points out, it remains unavailable to the vast majority of us and so the prospects for most sufferers of this awful disease continue to look ever more bleak – and even more so for their spouses or offspring who are almost invariably left to try and care for them.

The situation is not actually as bleak it might seem however.

By far the most significant factor in relieving the pressure and stress felt by relatives who would otherwise be left to deal with this condition on their own is having someone around who can basically shoulder a lot of the actual day-to-day burden of it on a hands-on basis rather than through counseling alone – or at all in fact. In other words, someone who can shoulder all the behavioural and physical demands of the person actually suffering from the disease and engage them emotionally also.

Time and again I have seen the lives of both sufferers and carers utterly transformed by this measure alone, and finally I have now experienced the benefits myself:

My own mother has for some while been afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease, a problem which was for a time exacerbated by her steadfast resistance to accepting any support at all outside of the family, which is often the case incidentally. But now we have a competent team of carers looking after her, it is hard to describe not only my own feeling of exaltation and well-being in seeing her being properly looked after by proper dementia-trained carers who take all this in their stride, but in witnessing also the distinct recovery in my mother’s own physical and emotional well-being.

And the moral of this story? Even the sufferers of Alzheimer’s disease don’t necessarily have to live a life of misery because of it.