Hello
I am new to this group and have been amazed how many people are going through exactly the same as me, sometimes I feel so lonely. My wonderful husband of 48 years was diagnosed with Alzheimer's 20 months ago and due to unforseen circumstances has gone downhill very fast. He has COPD and was prescribed Donezipal in September 2021 and the difference it made at that time was amazing, he was back to being king of Pointless!!. Unfortunately he had 11 chest infections in the following 15 months and every chest infection took a bit of him away and every infection made his COPD worse to the point where it had not really adversely affected his life, it now affects him every day now with greatly increased breathlessness. My daughter is a CPN and is doing the Prescribing Course at Uni and we had an upcoming drugs review so she researched what drugs may be available next. When she looked at Donepezil on the drugs site she uses she found that Donepezil was to be prescribed with caution to anyone with COPD and on the NHS site it said it shouldn't be prescribed to someone with COPD, Now I can't say for certain Donepezil was the cause of the 11 chest infections, what I can say is he had very few infections before he went on the Donepezil. I contacted the psychiatrist re this and he was taken off the Donepezil but why were we not made aware that if he had chest infections or his COPD worsened he should come off this drug. I would not have associated the drug with the repeated infections, who would? Thank God for my daughter. When he came off the Donepezil he started to go downhill rather rapidly to the point 10 weeks later he can do nothing for himself, he has even forgotten how to get into bed himself. He can feed himself sometimes, others not, his spatial awareness is non existent and had had a bad fall last week. His speech is very poor and we are very lucky to get a coherent sentence, He started om Memantine this week and all our hopes are pinned on that but optimism is very hard to find after all this
I am so sorry to be so pessimistic, this is not me I have always been a glass half full person but this disease has taken away all the optimism I ever had
I am new to this group and have been amazed how many people are going through exactly the same as me, sometimes I feel so lonely. My wonderful husband of 48 years was diagnosed with Alzheimer's 20 months ago and due to unforseen circumstances has gone downhill very fast. He has COPD and was prescribed Donezipal in September 2021 and the difference it made at that time was amazing, he was back to being king of Pointless!!. Unfortunately he had 11 chest infections in the following 15 months and every chest infection took a bit of him away and every infection made his COPD worse to the point where it had not really adversely affected his life, it now affects him every day now with greatly increased breathlessness. My daughter is a CPN and is doing the Prescribing Course at Uni and we had an upcoming drugs review so she researched what drugs may be available next. When she looked at Donepezil on the drugs site she uses she found that Donepezil was to be prescribed with caution to anyone with COPD and on the NHS site it said it shouldn't be prescribed to someone with COPD, Now I can't say for certain Donepezil was the cause of the 11 chest infections, what I can say is he had very few infections before he went on the Donepezil. I contacted the psychiatrist re this and he was taken off the Donepezil but why were we not made aware that if he had chest infections or his COPD worsened he should come off this drug. I would not have associated the drug with the repeated infections, who would? Thank God for my daughter. When he came off the Donepezil he started to go downhill rather rapidly to the point 10 weeks later he can do nothing for himself, he has even forgotten how to get into bed himself. He can feed himself sometimes, others not, his spatial awareness is non existent and had had a bad fall last week. His speech is very poor and we are very lucky to get a coherent sentence, He started om Memantine this week and all our hopes are pinned on that but optimism is very hard to find after all this
I am so sorry to be so pessimistic, this is not me I have always been a glass half full person but this disease has taken away all the optimism I ever had
