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Preventing Her Shutdown: Losing My Wife To Alzheimer's
by Sammie MarsalliPublish: Jun 15, 2022Series: Preventing Her Shutdown From Alzheimer'sAdvice & How To Biographies & Memoirs General NonfictionBook Overview
Preventing Her Shutdown Losing My Wife To Alzheimer's is an inside look at what a typical ongoing caregiver husband goes through in his desperate effort to keep his wife with Alzheimer's “connected.” She is in the advanced stages, as she doesn't speak.This book began as a daily diary of my caregiving, as my wife's behavior was drastically changing daily. Writing not only alleviated my continuous sorrow, but also helped me invent therapies and activities to interact with her continuous behavioral changes.
Soon, this diary became a book, where readers will witness an ongoing caregiver successes and failures.
No one has the exact key to how to respond to Alzheimer's radical behavioral changes, as there are no two profile behavioral changes alike, not even in the same stage of the disease. There isn't a standard set of therapies to apply. Even Alzheimer's stages are different in their characteristics. Only your own experiences will be your guide. “What works for me may not work for you.”
As a result, I began to create my own therapies. Each family is on their own as caregivers with their own personalized therapies because each profile is different, which affects the way you react to and care for this person. Each profile is different, which impacts the way you react to and care for this person.
Preventing Her Shutdown details my activities and actions in real-time racing against the Alzheimer's clock to keep her connected with me and her family, even though she is always silent, in my never-ending battle as her 24/7 caregiver husband.
How do I connect with my wife and get her to connect with me? This is always my constant desperation as her caregiver, especially because she can't talk. I am always afraid she will stop connecting with me, especially when I get that “blank, lost look” in her eyes. This book describes the steps taken to avoid losing that “connection”.
In 'Preventing Her Shutdown', readers will gain insight into the intuitive decisions I have made and the diverse therapies I have devised. The continuous search for opportunities to stimulate interaction and establish a connection with her alleviates my greatest apprehension of a shutdown.
Exposed in this book is my most complicated challenge as her caregiver husband:
How do we communicate?
How do I talk to her?
How does she tell me what she wants or needs?
What therapy and activity can I create?
Discover in Preventing Her Shutdown how we learned to “connect” with each other and communicate even though she doesn't speak. Readers will learn how she now silently “reaches out on her own'' to connect with me.
Preventing Her Shutdown exposes emotional demands as her caregiver husband. Very personal, unloaded emotions are unloaded and never confided to anyone as being too personal.
“What is she thinking or feeling, now that she is unable to speak a word?” I only have some facial expressions or sounds.
“Is she happy? Is she sad”?
“Sometimes I see a sad or lost face.”
“Does she know she is not well”?
“Does she know how she was before”?
“Does she remember her past”?
Then I realized “What about us”, our 44 years of marriage, does she remember that past? She recognizes and knows me well, but how far back? Did our marriage begin in 1979 or 2017, when she was diagnosed? I am not sure where I was in her memory or how she sees me as her friend, husband or simply a caregiver.
In Preventing her Shutdown, discover how her caregiver husband, married for 44 years, manages this emotional roller coaster successfully and unsuccessfully, sometimes with tremendous personal emotional impact.
This book is an essential read for anyone dealing with the struggles of caring for a loved one with Alzheimer's.
