Encouragement (In Suffering, Pain, and Witnessing Both…) #16: Sympathy for Another Passing…

The older I get, the more suffering and pain I’ve experienced; and the more of both I stand witness to. From my wife’s (and many, many of our friends and coworkers) battle against breast cancer; to my dad’s (and the parents of many of our friends and coworkers) process as he fades away as this complex disease breaks the connections between more and more memories, I have become not only frustrated with suffering, pain, and having to watch both, I have been witness to the suffering and pain among the students I serve as a school counselor. I have become angry and sometimes paralyzed. This is my attempt to lift myself from the occasional stifling grief that darkens my days…

Two days ago, a dear friend of ours lost her mother to Alzheimer’s.

Sad to say, she is one of a growing number of deaths that can be clearly related to Alzheimer’s. The question that’s always puzzled me is what EXACTLY does a person with Alzheimer’s die FROM? I get it when they get COVID19 or pneumonia, or cancer, or another disease – while it’s not directly related to AD, the disease is a factor.

Dad fell because he was disoriented – he’d been taking a set of dresser drawers apart with the intent of fixing them. Most likely he was exhausted from his efforts (the mess he made emptying it, tipping it over on its side and pulling it toward the toilet so he had somewhere to sit while he worked on it); the bed linens win complete disarray (the weekly staff practice of stripping the beds except for the spread); and the huge raspberry scrape and bump on his head which had never been reported to us! (led my sister who had visited him that day, to surmise the worst – that he’d been robbed or beat up or something else horrifying) no one on staff was able to explain the state of the room. We had to assume the worst and lodged a complaint with the facility…and found out the details (in parenthesis above) after some sleuthing…

Dad fell again not long after, which required a visit to the hospital and the acceleration of his deterioration. He never recovered from that incident and died several weeks later.

But what HAPPENS to an AD patient’s body? Does the immune system stop protecting them? Is there heart damage? What?

We DO know that Alzheimer’s and risk of heart failure occur together (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4409079/) (though the relationship between them is unclear); as well as high cholesterol. As well, besides the obvious alteration of mobility and memory loss, Alzheimer’s can also affect muscles, making them less flexible and more rigid (https://www.entrustdesoto.com/blog/how-does-alzheimers-effect-the-body-physically/) as well as creating difficulties in maintaining weight because AD affects the ability of a patient to both chew and swallow.

Recent research has also shown that AD affects the actual bacteria in the intestines: “New researches indicate that gastrointestinal tract microbiota are directly linked to dementia pathogenesis through triggering metabolic diseases and low-grade inflammation progress.” So, AD patients not only have trouble physically chewing their food, they also have trouble digesting it – which most likely leads to a decreasing desire to eat, which leads to weight loss…

OTOH, Dad was eating just fine a month before he died:

So, deterioration can happen very quickly. An aging immune system can in fact, have a profound impact on AD: “The aging of the immune system involves a series of changes which decrease the ability to fight off infections and increase chronic low-grade inflammation. These changes can promote chronic age-related diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease. The immune system can affect cognition, and the majority of genes shown to influence Alzheimer’s disease risk impact the function of the immune system. This suggests that aging-related changes to the immune system may impact the risk and rate of cognitive decline, and that maintaining a healthy immune system could help stave off dementia.” (https://www.alzdiscovery.org/cognitive-vitality/blog/is-there-a-link-between-the-immune-system-and-cognitive-health)

So, this is the opposite – AD isn’t caused by an again immune system (at least not that we know of yet…) but that system failure can exacerbate AD…

All of this to say, our sympathies lie with you, DC; you and your family at the loss of your dear Mom…It’s NOT encouragement in the usual way today; rather I want to acknowledge the loss and offer my heartfelt prayers in this time of BOTH grief, and resignation at the end to suffering.

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