As an author I am certainly not an expert or an authority on Alzheimer’s. I am definitely not a professional author and didn´t pretend to write an authoritative masterpiece. I never pretended to be either one of those things. I am simply an ordinary “John Doe” caregiver, husband sharing my experiences living and caring for my wife with Alzheimer’s. We have been married 43 years, 3 kids now grown up, a great dog most of those years, a typical family on our own trying to hold on to my wife and avoid her shutdown. I began to realize there are probably other “amateur” folks like me on their own trying to take care of a loved one with this disease and possibly could benefit from my shared personal experiences. Soon this diary turned into this book.
This book started out as a daily diary of how my wife´s behavior was dramatically changing and how I was affected and began to relate to her differently. Writing helped me ventilate my deepest emotions and reactions in private as they were too personal to express to others. Somehow writing “alleviated” my continuous sorrow but also indirectly helped me make personal decisions and changes in how to interact with her behavioral changes. Taking notes almost daily seemed to be my personal escape.
Preventing Her Shutdown is my desperate effort to keep my wife with Alzheimer’s “connected”. In Real Time there are very personal unloaded feelings, emotions and reactions expressed, never confided to anyone while slowly losing my wife.
There are no two profile behavioral changes alike with Alzheimer´s. I describe these dramatic changes with my wife who is in the beginning of the advanced stages. My reactions have always been intuitive in my desperate attempts to keep her “connected” with me, family and her surroundings. Real time experiences and actions “racing against the Alzheimer’s clock” to keep her communicating and interacting every day, even though she no longer speaks are detailed in my never-ending battle to prevent her shutdown.