USD Magazine, Fall 2000

When Alzheimer's Disease Strikes the Family

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The strain of taking care of a loved one with Alzheimer's disease o~en can be too much to handle, unless families are prepared to face the illness with a united front. Some USD experts have ideas about where to start.

BY MICHAEL R. HASKINS

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e's been 20 years, but Larry Dolan will never forger rhe terrifying phone call chat changed his family forever. Sound asleep at 3 a.m., he fumbled for rhe ringing phone and awoke to hear his panicked mother on the ocher end of the line. Could he come home right away? There was a strange man in the house. Dolan, a USD religious studies pro– fessor and campus chaplain at the rime, threw on some cloches, barged out of his Maher Hall apartment and sped over to his parents' Point Loma home. H e arrived to find his mother confronting a man she didn't know. The man was his father. "There were signs for a long rime char things weren't quire right, moscly litcle things char she would forger," says Dolan, whose mother had Alzheimer's disease for almost eight years before she died in 1984. ''As her condition worsened, she needed more care than we could provide. My dad's health was deteriorating, and at char rime there was no day care for Alzheimer's patients. We pretty much faced it alone." Dolan and his father, Patrick, cared for his mother for six years, bur in 1982 made the difficult decision to move her into a 24-hour care unit with the local Sisters of Nazareth, a religious order char operated a nursing home in San Diego. The two years of full-rime care completely depleted the family's savings, but Dolan had no ocher options.

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