Families Decision to Withhold Diagnosis of Demenia
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My brother & I decided NOT to tell our late mom that she had Alzheimer's. She'd been perfectly fine mentally , altho under severe stress while caring for our dad who had terminal cancer. After he died..she woke up & found him one morning...she went into a depression & then developed memory problems. She took dad's death personally & it brought back the memories of every relative she ever had that died. She felt that she was being punished somehow & that fate was against her.
We did a lot of praying together & that helped her to feel better about accepting dad's loss as well as the others'. We had her treated for depression & it went away but the memory problems persisted & got worse. We had her tested & she was diagnosed with AD. Her brother also got it after a skull fracture in an accident but since he lived out of state & she rarely saw him, we didn't tell her about him after we found out about it.
Mom knew something was wrong with her memory & was scared she might be losing her mind. We had gut feelings that if we told her she had such a HORRIBLE disease it would destroy her because it would bring back those feelings of punishment & fate being against her plus the feelings of the loss of other relatives all magnified by the new fact that now she'd been picked to lose her very MIND. We decided to tell her she still had depression from grief over dad. She was able to handle that quite well.
I put her in a drug trial for Cognex which gave her another 1 1/2 good years in which I was able to take her to movies, concerts,visits to old pals , & relatives & in general pay her back for all she'd done for me over the years before she got to the point when she had to go into a nursing home.
I'm sure that I wouldn't have been able to give her those last good times if she'd known all along about the AD.
