Raising Awareness of Alzheimer’s

To all the bloggers out there

For those of you that follow me, you may have noticed that I have been absent from blogger land recently and not been able to keep up to date with your creations. I have also had to give up some of my design work, so that I could focus on Mum. Its been a terrible few months, unfortunately her Alzheimer's has got worse and she she developed a UTI infection in November which knocked her back. She was in hospital for over a week and shortly after coming home the infection had returned. She was put on a course of antibiotics but unfortunately just before Christmas she had a nasty fall and broke her hip. On top of having an infection and her Alzheimer's she had to undergo a major hip replacement operation. 

It is very sad as we have not managed to get her walking since the operation and the medical team doubt she will walk again given its been over 5 weeks since the operation. It makes it worse as she cannot express herself  and the physios cannot get her to communicate and she just says no, when they ask her to go for a walk, therefore they have not managed to get her to stand on her own and she is hoist in and out of bed. To make matters worse she would not eat after her operation which we thought was due to the high dosage of drugs but we then discovered that the part of the brain that tells the stomach it is hungry is no longer working and also the inability to swallow has developed which unfortunately is another side  of the condition. They have put her on a puree diet but she will not take it and just refuses food and drink. On occasions we can get some fluids and a few spoonfuls of dinner down, but nowhere near what she needs. There is no other solution as tubes down the throat or in the stomach  would not work as she is so frail and they also come with dangers of infection. As a family we have to visit her regular throughout the day and hope that we can get some food down her. 

The nursing staff on ward 205 of the Royal Derby hospital have been amazing trying to get her to eat and she smiles and laughs for all of them. They gave us permission to visit her at any time during the day in order to help with the food intake, as you have to catch her when you can and feed her small portions throughout the day.The only thing we can hold onto is the fact that she does still know us and smiles and kisses us all when we go to see her. 

She is due home on Wednesday with a full care package and as a family we will do our best to get her to eat. My Dad is amazing and will take care of her throughout the day when she comes home and with family and friends we hope to get her eating a sufficient amount of food each day. 

I wanted to share this with you all in order to raise awareness of this terrible condition and the impact it has on the persons day to day life. I will continue to raise as much money as possible for this cause, but it needs all of us to raise the awareness of this artful disease. 

I made this canvas to put in the day room room in ward 205 to help get people involved and aware. The poem is from the Alzheimer's website which really touched my heart. 

Please could I request that you all help by posting this post on your blog to help raise the awareness of this awful condition that attacks numerous people worldwide.