Hello everybody, I'm new to this forum so not sure if I'm going about it right. I'd like to ask if anybody else has found themselves in the same position as me: my husband who is 80 has a diagnosis of Alzheimer's. He was initially diagnosed about a year ago but there has been confusion ever since about his diagnosis, with different doctors telling us different things - first he had it, then he didn't, then maybe he had Mild Cognitive Impairment, and so on. Now a different doctor at a different memory clinic has said he definitely has it, and has prescribed donepezil, which he started four days ago.
Could I ask two things please. My first difficulty is that I've been given, and read, an awful lot of information about the disease but half of the time I simply don't recognise my husband in it. Certainly he has problems with his short-term memory but that's about it really, apart from that his life carries on completely normally. Did anybody else find that at the beginning please? It does mean that I find it very difficult to find any useful support as everything seems to refer to things that we are just not experiencing, and it doesn't sound like him at all.
The second thing is that I am very concerned about these tablets. The doctor said there might be side effects but we should give it a week or two and it should settle down. However my perception is that my husband has immediately got very noticeably worse the moment he started taking it. He's confused, absent-minded, not with it at all - in fact, the sort of things that people usually ascribe to Alzheimer's - but it's almost as if the medication is doing it to him! Is this normal? I was dubious about him needing to take it in the first place, but now I'm not just dubious but downright worried. I've left a message for the doctor at the clinic but no response so far.
Could I ask two things please. My first difficulty is that I've been given, and read, an awful lot of information about the disease but half of the time I simply don't recognise my husband in it. Certainly he has problems with his short-term memory but that's about it really, apart from that his life carries on completely normally. Did anybody else find that at the beginning please? It does mean that I find it very difficult to find any useful support as everything seems to refer to things that we are just not experiencing, and it doesn't sound like him at all.
The second thing is that I am very concerned about these tablets. The doctor said there might be side effects but we should give it a week or two and it should settle down. However my perception is that my husband has immediately got very noticeably worse the moment he started taking it. He's confused, absent-minded, not with it at all - in fact, the sort of things that people usually ascribe to Alzheimer's - but it's almost as if the medication is doing it to him! Is this normal? I was dubious about him needing to take it in the first place, but now I'm not just dubious but downright worried. I've left a message for the doctor at the clinic but no response so far.