There is a reason that you do not share bad news with Alzheimer’s patients. You can tell your loved one 20 amazing things that are happening and one single bad thing and that is what they will focus on. That one bad piece of information. They will become agitated and out of sorts. They will lose sleep and in the case of my mother who has always suffered from a “nervous stomach”, they can get very sick from bad news.

I try at all costs to shelter momma from anything that I think will cause this unwanted disruption in our lives, but it isn’t always easy. We found out last night that my older brother who lives a couple of states away has fallen and broken his leg. He has already had a lot of medical issues and that has made this latest development a pretty big set back. I have explained to family members over and over that you don’t share this kind of information with mom anymore, but being that they don’t live close to us I guess they don’t see the damage that they are doing to her.

We have a trip planned to see them in two weeks to celebrate both mom and my brother’s birthdays (they are two days apart). Between all the craziness that has been going on in our lives and his medical issues plus the fact that we haven’t seen him in about two years. I wish the news had waited until we arrived, but this time it couldn’t really be helped since we had to change certain aspects of the trip. She will make herself sick for the next two weeks stressing out about him and no amount of reassurance will fix it.

Since becoming a full-time caregiver I have learned to pretty much live without sleep. I average about 4 hours a night off and on. I keep one ear tuned into the coming and goings from mom’s room all night. I heard her “on the hamster wheel” pretty much all night last night so we are both working on about 2 hours today.

The “hamster wheel” is our term (my husband and mine) for the constant opening and closing of dresser drawers throughout the night. My bedroom is right across the hall and this sounds like a hamster that is running on one of those little wheels. She starts at one end and works her way around the room over and over and over and over (get the picture). At one or two in the morning, this can and will drive you crazy, but there is nothing to be done about it. For some reason, this seems to calm her down a little bit and well, we have just learned to live with it. I can expect the same thing to occur every night for the next two weeks.

I have written before about how important it is for family members to not only be supportive of the caregiver but to take the time to learn about the disease itself. If a person spends time with an AD patient and talks about all the bad things going on in their lives this is not helping the caregiver. It is making their job so much harder than it is already.