Christine,
"Why is it the loved ones carry on worrying?" is a very good question that I would love to have answered.
My mam has worried herself sick over my Gran in the last few years, with every aspect of deterioration came another pile of woes.
Gran is now in a Care Home near me, which is what we were all waiting and hoping for, and now mam's worrying that she might be badly thought of if she doesn't go see Gran for one day!
We no longer have to worry about whether Gran has gone walkabout, whether she's eaten, taken her meds, had a bath, etc etc, and you'd imagine that the pressure is lifted. Nooooooo..........poor mam still finds things that worry her and imagines that Gran will feel like she's been dumped and forgotten if she doesn't go every day.
Lotti, every case of Alzheimers is different of course, but we found that once Gran started going on the wander, it just got worse, (sorry, probably not what you want to hear.). She started off late at night, then progressed to early evening, til eventually she was gone one morning before the carer arrived at 8.00a.m. Some silly person from SS did say once that her wandering may be a one off, but in our experience it went from bad to worse. She'd have been away in the hospital too if the door hadn't been a secure one with a press-to-release door lock that she wouldn't have known how to operate. She was wandering the wards all night according to her other dorm-mates, and would wake people touching them, talking to them and so on.
We got an alarm system installed by SS that helped in the end, in that it alerted someone back at base and they would send a warden p.d.q to go find her. They weren't happy for us to lock Gran in, and yet we couldn't fathom a way to stop her wandering I'm afraid.
Gill
xx