Alzheimer’s Acceptance: Blog 4 – Personal Experience

Hello and welcome to the Alzheimer’s Acceptance Series!

This is the penultimate blog in this series, Personal Experience.

If any of you read the story that came attached to the blog last week you will already know of what happened when my grandmother forgot me for the first time. It was one of the hardest hurdles I have had to jump over in my life. It was a hard hurdle but a necessary one.

Accepting Alzheimer’s is often a challenging but necessary obstacle. Once you accept that someone has Alzheimer’s then it allows you to develop ways to support them. This blog is going to talk about some of the experiences and struggles that I have had in accepting Alzheimer’s.

The first challenging that I had with Alzheimer’s was hearing that my grandmother had the illness. When I was first told by my mother that my grandmother had the illness I did not really know how to react. Thoughts whirred through my mind and I found myself asking should I be mad? Should I be sad? What should I feel?

I couldn’t comprehend how a standing stone in my life had now become like a broken pebble on the beach, broken away from its original self. In these months where I did not accept the illness, it caused lots of sleepless nights and damage to my university work. I had to learn how to be resilient to the illness before it would break me as well. This was but one of the obstacles I learnt to accept.

The next major obstacle came when visiting my grandparent’s house. I use to spend nearly two days a week when I was younger, a time which has sadly decreased in the more recent years. After hearing that my grandmother had Alzheimer’s I found it increasingly hard to visit their house. I was scared of being forgotten and I was scared that the person I would see would no longer be the person I grew up with. Even now after I have fully accepted my grandmother’s condition, I still find it hard to call over as much as I used to. It’s an obstacle that I am close to fully accepting and one that I am still thinking of ways to overcome it.

These are just two of the large obstacles I have had to understand and overcome in regard to my grandmothers Alzheimer’s. There have been many other obstacles that I have learned to accept but I thought it would be best just to focus on one.

Thank you all for reading the penultimate blog in my Alzheimer’s Acceptance series! Next weeks blog is going to be a conclusion to the series. I hope you’ve enjoyed the series, it has been a rather sad but informative series. If anyone has any feedback, questions or queries please get in touch with me!

James Sweeney