To Someone Who Has Just Been Diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease

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My name is Amy and this is my message to anyone that has just had a Loved one Diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

As someone who has dealt with a Loved one with Alz for a few years now, I feel like I can offer some words of advice for those who are just entering this new world. It can definitely be a pain to deal with from time to time. Sometimes it might even make you change up whole aspects of your life so you can handle the disease. Believe me, there have been many changes I have been forced to make. Some of them not so easy. However, all of these changes were necessary for the long game I’ll be playing with caregiving.

You see, there is no cure for Alzheimer’s. There are some options that may relieve symptoms temporarily but there is no cure all. So you should be planning everything around the idea of your loved one living with this disease for the foreseeable future. It’s important to educate yourself now versus later. Knowledge is power and having all the knowledge at the start will make the rest of the journey that much easier to deal with. It took years for me to finally finish a book my husband had given me when my mom was first diagnosed. At first, I was in denial and refused to read it. Later on, that denial turned into laziness. Then the laziness turned into forgetting about the book. I found it awhile later after the pain of caregiving became too much and finally dived into it.

Knowledge is power and can make your life easier in the long run. That’s the purpose of this post. To get you to start thinking about the long-term. The best thing to do for the long-term is to fill yourself with all the knowledge that you can, as fast as possible. I hope you take this message to heart, as I wish I had been given this advice when I was first diagnosed.

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