One of the things that we … it’s always a concern of how to talk to the family about what they should do, how should they prepare for what’s to come. We have a course for medical students, a little snippet that we do for medical students and residents called delivering bad news or talking to people about serious illnesses and those sorts of things. One of the things that we emphasize is that it’s almost … it’s like a cancer diagnosis in a way, only worse in many ways. Once you tell somebody they have Alzheimer's disease or once you have this conversation with the person who has it and the family with them, they don’t hear much after that.
What I usually do is I say, “Okay, this is what it looks like. Your history, the lab work that we’ve done, all the other things point toward Alzheimer's disease and this means that you're going to have continuing problems with your memory, continuing problems with your thinking and here’s a little bit of information.” We have some pamphlets and we give them the website for the Alzheimer's Association. “We’ll get back together next week and we’ll spend much more time talking about this next week.”
The Alzheimer's Association website is very useful for families in terms of preparing for the next few months, for the next few years. A book that I like the most is called The 36-Hour Day by Nancy Mace and Peter Rabins. Nancy Mace is a PhD nurse. Peter Rabins is a psychiatrist who’s worked at Johns Hopkins, who’s worked with dementia for decades. It’s a very useful book about how to manage different kinds of behaviors and so forth. It’s really a constant conversation about preparation. It’s a constant conversation because as we’ve talked about, it’s a journey. You're not in there and here’s an antibiotic for your respiratory infection. It’s going to go on for a long time.
