A Journey With Alzheimer s Disease - 1173 Words

A harrowing, poignant account of caring for not only one, but two Alzheimer’s patients, Slow Dancing with a Stanger Lost and Found in the Age of Alzheimer’s is a first hand experience with Alzheimer’s disease that leaves the reader moved, intrigued, and a little worried about what is to come with the aging process. The book is not an easy read as it gives a very unromantic summation of being a caretaker to a person with Alzheimer’s disease. Meryl Cromer, the author and caretaker in the novel, was a very ambitious woman for her time. She had a career in television and spent more than 30 years in broadcast journalism. She married her husband, Harvey Gralnick, in 1978. Both of their careers were flourishing; however, their marriage was not.†¦show more content†¦He would crash his car leading Cromer to disconnect his car battery, urinate in public, and ultimately lose his job. In contrast, Gralnick, in his heyday, was a prominent physician focusing in oncology and hematology at the National Institute of Health. He is known on an international scale for his groundbreaking research in leukemia. As the disease progressed, He spent three months degeneration was fast. He became increasingly forgetful and was soon unable to do basic tasks for himself. Harvey was incontinent, unable to bathe himself, unable to feed himself, and sometimes even abusive. These symptoms are very common for those with Alzheimer’s disease many patients also experience lack of sleep (Whitbourne, 2011, p. 103). He even went as far as to knock a few of Meryl’s teeth out. It was therefore up to Meryl to meet these needs in the book, which is quite a tall order in terms of caregiving. This demand caused her social and work life that was once vibrant and bustling to diminish to nearly nothing. She also had to cater to her husband’s outburst in addition to caring for his daily needs. She would set up mirrors in the house in order to see when he was coming so that she would not be taken by surprise. The caregiver burden, a term used to define the stress that caregivers endure, is very evident in Meryl’s case (Whitbourne, 2011, p.