Dementia - When He Left Home
KFF Article:
That's what happened to Sheila Fridovich, whose husband, Bernard, developed Pick's disease, a form of dementia, in his late 60s. Sheila kept him at home in Annapolis, eventually hiring a daytime aide, for nearly six years.
"I couldn't eat; I couldn't breathe; I didn't have a moment's peace," she acknowledges. Yet she refused to see a therapist or join a support group. "I needed to iron it out in my own head," she says.
"We grew up in a generation where getting help from a therapist is not stigmatized," theorizes her daughter Lauri Fridovich Lee, who joined a support group online. "For the older generation, it is."
Eventually, consulting with a Veterans Affairs physician about drug coverage, Sheila discovered that Bernard, a Navy veteran, was eligible for admission to a specialized dementia unit at the VA Community Living and Rehabilitation Center in Baltimore. She moved Bernard there in 2006. At 79, he's still a resident and gets excellent care, she says. But after a stroke, he cannot speak, and she's not sure, on her Sunday visits, if he knows who she is.
"It's a traumatic experience for a husband and wife, far more than for their kids," Fridovich says now. She's only 71, still working part time as an educational consultant, but "the way I live is not the way I lived before. I'm married but I'm not; I have a husband but I don't. I'm in no man's land."
