A Caregiver’s Tips: My Wife Had Alzheimer’s Disease

My purpose in writing this account is to share my experiences, ideas, and any insight gained as a caregiver during a nine-year journey coping with my wife’s Alzheimer’s disease.

My hope is that the one hundred thirty-four tips included in this personal story as a caregiver may help other caregivers who choose to keep their loved one at home. To choose to do so is one of the most physically and mentally challenging tasks anyone will ever encounter that demands total dedication on the part of the caregiver.

Each chapter highlights tips for caregivers about legal matters, Social Security, progress of the disease, patient behaviors, adjustments to daily life, hygiene, food, and meals, medications, hospice care, preparing for the demise, memorial services, and after-death issues.

The author Fred Buse was born on Long Island. He obtained licenses to operate a power plant and a water treatment plant in New Jersey. He was employed by Ingersoll Rand Co. in the industrial pump division. He became chief engineer of a pump division and then was promoted to consulting engineer within the company until retirement.

He was also the engineering representative for Hydraulic Institute, a national pump organization, to write national and international pump standards. He contributed chapters on pumps for three handbooks and wrote articles for industrial journals. He conceived the ideas and obtained twenty-six U.S. patents. He was married in 1960, and he has one son. He retired after forty-two years to care for his wife until she succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease.

Presently he is a master gardener for Penn State, and he still enjoys engineering consulting, writing the pheneology of his garden, and reporting annual bird activity for Cornell University.