by Matthew J. Geiger

Created on: July 19, 2009

Thanks to a class project during my sophomore year of college, I had the opportunity to spend a significant amount of time with a group of elderly suffering from Alzheimer's disease. Through that experience, I learned the disease affects people very differently while every individual suffering from this illness has his or her own special needs. While understanding the disease medically continues to challenge the scientific community, fully comprehending the effects of the Alzheimer's disease on a personal level may not ever be possible. On the other hand, some understanding of how individuals experience this disease may help loved ones, as well as patients, cope. The key to understanding Alzheimer's disease stems from the ability to deconstruct our perception of the world and relate past experiences to new events.

If you were allowed to read a book only once then forced to recite it over and over again for the rest of your life, you would quickly negate key details while the events would become garbled as you struggled to remember those details out of order; like an Alzheimer's victim, you would become confused and, eventually, your recitation would become utterly unintelligible. With the loss of random memories and cognitive abilities, a person can no longer rely on past experiences to fully explain how they should react to new events, so they lose the ability to properly react to new experiences. This causes individuals to see the world through a spotted lens where their internal worlds no longer fully connect to the outer world. For particularly egocentric individuals, a lack of diagnosis could leave such an individual scrambling to understand why the world is suddenly so erratic.

As the disease progresses, patients can understand something is wrong, because the people around them react to their condition. More perceptive individuals may at first understand what is wrong with them, but slowly lose their ability to interact with the world in a meaningful way, as if they are drowning inside their own minds. Meanwhile, helping these people hold onto their memories and cognitive abilities through therapeutic techniques is necessary, but loved ones can also seriously agitate a demented person by correcting them or forcing them to recognize certain facts about their environment, like the correct year. The best course is to ask Alzheimer's victims to tell you stories as you gently push for greater details, so they can exercise their brains without being agitated. Frankly, caring for these individuals is quite difficult, especially for family members and close friends, due to the challenge of understanding demented individuals as well as the emotional stress involved in caring for someone dying so slowly.

Most importantly, Alzheimer's disease is about hope and acceptance. There is always hope that an effective treatment or cure could soon be found; however, we must also be willing to accept the fact that the disease consumes everything that makes a person an individual. Fighting this reality will only hurt loved ones while it is certain to agitate and confuse Alzheimer's victims. Coping with the Alzheimer's disease means cherishing what is left of a person before they are completely lost or a cure is found; beyond that, there is only hope. One of the greatest surprises I had from working with Alzheimer's patients came a few months after my schedule no longer allowed time for our visits when I ran into one of the patient's daughter. Many of my new friends still remembered me and wanted to know when I would be coming to see them again.

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