Two-thirds of the 5.5 million
Americans with Alzheimer’s are women. Why? The most obvious factor is age.
Women have longer lifespans and are more likely to reach the age of highest
risk. Women worry more than men do about developing Alzheimer’s, and with good
reason. A sixty-five-year-old woman has a 20 percent risk of developing
dementia during her lifetime. I don’t know about you, but I’m not happy with
those odds.
Being a caregiver for my husband
was never a part of my vision of our life together. Jim was decisive, a man of
strong convictions, protective, creative, and loving. Never in my wildest
imagination could I have envisioned the turn our lives would take when he
developed dementia. And certainly, if an Alzheimer’s type of dementia had
entered my mind, I would have thought of him as an elderly man, not one who
wouldn’t live to see his sixtieth birthday.
The job of caregiver falls more
often on women. They are two and a half times more likely than men to provide
around the clock care for a loved one who is in the late stages of the disease.
Female caregivers are daughters, wives, siblings, friends, and in younger
onset—mothers. In a study of caregivers, indications are that females are
substantially more likely than males to provide intimate personal care for
their loved one with Alzheimer’s. Female caregivers assume responsibility for bathing,
dressing, toileting, and changing adult diapers.
Caregiving adversely affects
women’s employment. Twice as many women as men give up their careers entirely
to be caregivers. Seven times as many women as men go from working full-time to
part-time in order to be a caregiver.
I was in my forties when Jim
developed dementia and worked full-time. Quitting work wasn’t an option for me.
There were times when the challenges of juggling a job and caregiving seemed
overwhelming. Jim required only about four hours of sleep at night, and I often
went to work sleep deprived and emotionally drained. To further complicate
things, from time-to-time I would receive a phone call and have to go home to
tend to the latest challenge—wandering, refusing to let someone else do
something for him, or just to comfort him when he was scared or depressed.
Think about it—as a woman you are
more likely to be a caregiver for a loved one with Alzheimer’s, and then, after
years of caregiving, you are more likely to develop the disease. We women have
a large stake in ending Alzheimer’s. Our brains matter to us, and we want to
keep them healthy throughout our lifetimes. We need to join together as women,
as caring people, and as advocates to end Alzheimer’s now.
Copyright © September 2018 by L.S.
Fisher
#ENDALZ
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