Early Signs of Alzheimer's

The early signs of Alzheimer's are, shall we say, hardly worthy of an early diagnosis.

A warning to those reading this... you will find that you have some of these early signs already, no matter who you are or whether you have the disease or not. It's part of what makes the diagnosis of Alzheimer's so difficult.

I can only tell you our own experience, and (to dredge up an old cliché) your mileage may vary.

Everyone experiences the annoying forgetful times once in awhile, where are my glasses, the car keys, etc.. Everyone occasionally loses a train of thought in mid sentence or forgets someone's name at the moment of critical recall. But these are also some of the early signs that somethin' ain't right.

My wife, now age 55 is starting her 3rd year of a battle with Alzheimer's after being diagnosed with it at age 53. Once we had the diagnosis it was easier to look back and identify things that were clues before we even knew she had a problem. They most likely surfaced when she was 52, but were not taken as any serious sign of anything... until they began to affect her work.

Prior to that, however... well, you have to know a bit about her. She has always been a real "people person", well liked, fun loving, athletic tendencies, almost always the team mom on her son's baseball, basketball, soccer and volleyball teams. She was a lay counselor at the church and involved with the church *care team*. Popular since high school, she was not stuck up, not above anyone else, and could get along with just about anyone.

So... she could always tell a story, usually about things that happened to us or the boys, but at some point she began to just start stories... then stop and look at me to finish them. Being no verbal slouch myself, I just took it as a compliment that she thought I could tell it better... and so I happily finished her stories for her. I don't believe anyone thought anything of it.

Before she landed her job working as a Dean's assistant at a local college, we both attended a 12-week course on Microsoft Office. I already knew it pretty well, but you can never know it perfectly, so I took it with her for moral support, and though she wasn't a *power user* by any stretch of the imagination, she worked the lessons on her own and worked them out with just a little help from me. She became, very quickly, proficient at Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, even going on a couple of years later to take another course by herself on Access, the database module of Microsoft Office Pro. She handled complicated scheduling tasks for work, created org charts, wrote documents, handled email and was just all around a good worker and employee. Her bosses gave her high marks on evaluations year after year.

But a few months before her final boss began finding fault with her, she had begun getting confused in our home office when it came to doing some things with the computer. It was just annoying to me and I thought she was just being over emotional and lazy minded when she would ask for help and get teary eyed.

I had no clue what was really going on in her mind.

Though she had loved going to work for several years, she began to dislike it. Then the Dean she had been working for retired and a new Dean became her boss. The previous Deans she had worked for had been great guys. They had both worked their way to the positions they had by merit. This new dean had gotten where she was mostly by manipulation.

This new aggressive and non-forgiving personality proved overwhelming for my wife. And so, when the new boss said, in a non-caring way, that she thought my wife was having short term memory problems... we naturally chalked it up to stress on the job.

I took her to our long time personal physician, who examined her, and noting the high anxiety and stress level, ordered her to take a leave of absence. We all felt that just getting her out of the work environment for a few weeks would let her be herself again.

We were wrong. My wife is and has always been a trooper, after the leave, she was anxious and willing to go back to work. But a couple of days back in the environment was more than she could take. Our physician doubled the leave time and sent us for a preliminary evaluation to a neurologist... who diagnosed her with dementia and prescribed Aricept... and it was just about that impersonal. In fact, that neurologist was so cold and uncaring that my wife never wanted to see him again. I complied.

She went through a third-party, two weekend series of cognitive tests that that neuroligist had prescribed, and got the bad news that she probably was in the early stages of Alzheimer's, a stage sometimes called MCI, or Mild Cognitive Impairment.

It was then that I knew we were in serious trouble.