Caregiver’s Diary: An Alzheimer's Story

By Robert Patrick

After COVID-19, the next medical crisis will be Alzheimer’s Disease. It is estimated to impact 5.5 million in the US alone. This little booklet chronicles one woman’s slide into eternity. The disease is hard to diagnose, and both difficult and expensive to treat. The disease sometimes starts in middle age, but mostly affects the elderly. Once it affects a family, it tends to dominate all other activities. It affects all races and appears worldwide. This booklet tells of ten years care for one man’s wife. Compare your situation to his.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Sep 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781638298885

Robert Patrick

Robert Patrick: engineer, computer pioneer, sometime author. Developed ranch with solar home and lighted airstrip, commuted to clients in California in own airplane, co-founded one startup, and was self-employed for 32 years. Married to Corinne for 65 years and cared for her in last 10 years of her life.

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About the Author

Robert Patrick: engineer, computer pioneer, sometime author. Developed ranch with solar home and lighted airstrip, commuted to clients in California in own airplane, co-founded one startup, and was self-employed for 32 years. Married to Corinne for 65 years and cared for her in last 10 years of her life.

Copyright Information ©

Robert Patrick 2023

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher.

Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

All of the events in this memoir are true to the best of author’s memory. The views expressed in this memoir are solely those of the author.

Ordering Information

Quantity sales: Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the address below.

Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

Patrick, Robert

Caregiver’s Diary

ISBN 9781638298878 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781638298885 (ePub e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023912908

www.austinmacauley.com/us

First Published 2023

Austin Macauley Publishers LLC

40 Wall Street 33rd Floor, Suite 3302

New York, NY 10005

USA

[e-mail]

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Preface

Hi, my name is Bob and I don’t have Alzheimer’s. There are many books about Alzheimer’s disease (some excellent, see Note 1) but not many by caregivers. My wife, Corinne, and I have been married 65 years and I have been her caregiver for about the last 10 or so of those years. I’ve made some mistakes and had some successes. That is what this booklet is about.

There are ten parts to this booklet. The first part is about my wife: who she was, what she did, and how she lived. How you deal with a person who is afflicted is, at least partially, determined by who she was. The second part of this booklet is about the onset: how she acted, what she did, what I did, and what we learned. The third part is after the diagnosis: The mistakes we made, and the mistakes that were made for us. The fourth part is about paperwork, financial and otherwise. The other Parts contain what I learned when I set up her estate. Read on, you may learn something, see a citation pointing to some useful document, or confirm something you suspect.

I am an engineer, not a medical doctor, but I see things that others overlook, search the internet diligently, and sometimes find humor in unexpected places. Good luck following the Alzheimer’s trail.*

Bob P

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* Clarification: As more physicians began to treat more Alzheimer’s patients, more measures/calibrations of the patient’s condition began to be proposed/published. This Booklet uses the work of Dr. Reisberg. A discussion of it appears on Page 26.↩︎

Part 1

Pursuing Opportunities

After I got out of the USAF, I went to work at an aircraft foundry in Ft. Worth, TX. They were getting ready to install their first big IBM computer, and I had computer experience. A few months later, we were up and running and needed someone to run our production jobs so the originating programmer could do other work.

Corinne was hired while I was establishing the production environment. I trained her to operate the machine and run production jobs. She was divorced, had two kids, and had been a boot model for Justin Boots because she had nice legs. We worked side by side for some time. She was smart, had some college (Wisconsin), and did have nice legs.

We were supporting a big engineering department which was designing a new military airplane. When a computer job achieved production status, the originating programmer had to produce a set of operating instructions and, after a test run, turn the package over to Corinne for production operation.

Since I had several jobs in production status, I picked one and got her started running it. When the machine was