Wandering Alzheimer's

Here is a post from www.mycarelink.net a forum for families who are caring for a loved one with Alzheimer's.

The lost are found, with a little help from Safe Return Program
Keeping them safe
By Lisa Ryckman, Rocky Mountain News

November 14, 2005

On a fall day seven years ago, Kenneth Talburt went for a walk and never came back.

Nobody knows where the 75-year-old man thought he was going when he put on the baseball cap that proclaimed him "No. 1 Granddad" and left his home at the Grandview Acres trailer park in Cañon City.

For years, nobody knew where Kenneth Talburt was.

And he was only a mile away.

Some hikers found his remains, and the hat given to him by his granddaughters, down a steep embankment in a wooded area in May. It appeared that he had walked until he couldn't anymore.

Like the estimated 30,000 other people who wander away every year, Talburt's last walk was propelled by Alzheimer's or some other dementia-related disease, police believe. It's estimated that 60 percent of the 4.5 million Americans with dementia will wander, becoming lost and confused - even in a place they've lived for years.

There's a one-day window to find them before their chances of survival are cut in half, research shows.

"It's very dangerous behavior," says Catherine Sewell, director of client services for the Alzheimer's Association. "And the longer they're missing, the worse it is."

While the word wandering implies aimlessness, its definition changes when dementia is involved, says Jennifer Pancer, safety specialist with the Alzheimer's Association. Most people who become lost had a goal in mind.

"These folks get stuck in a past time, and they head out to fulfill whatever was happening at that time in their lives," she says.

Deborah Uetz's father was used to driving and taking long walks when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, even though he was getting lost in the home he'd lived in for 50 years.

"The fear of him becoming lost was my greatest nightmare," says Uetz, co-author of Into the Mist: When Someone You Love Has Alzheimer's. "My husband's grandmother had suffered from Alzheimer's disease and was killed by a truck while wandering on a dark road in the middle of the night."

But putting limitations on loved ones, even for their own good, can cause guilt feelings for caregivers, she says.

"Asking my dad for his car keys was one of the hardest things I ever had to do," Uetz says. "Unfortunately, there are a staggering number of people who are driving with dementia because it is so upsetting to take their keys."

To keep her father safe during his walks, Uetz went along.

"The unexpected outcome of that was some conversations that meant the world to me," she says. "He talked about things he did when he was a little boy and even told me about the first girl he ever kissed. I actually got to know him better after his illness than I had before his symptoms began."

Wandering can happen at any time, Pancer says, and any memory can trigger it. A woman who was put on a bus in Missouri bound for Georgia ended up in New Jersey - the site of her daughter's funeral four years earlier. She was living on the street when she was found nine days later.

"Her daughter's funeral may have been the last time she was on Greyhound," Pancer says.

Wanderers on wheels, such as a man who drove across three states because he thought he needed to get to work, are rare, Pancer says. Most go on foot, like Anna Sporcich, who clearly had a destination when she walked away from her Denver assisted-living residence in May, an extra pair of shoes in her hand.

She headed to the home she'd lived in for 27 years but fell down with nine blocks to go. Police took her to the emergency room and tracked down her daughter, Mary Hanna.

"I sat in a chair crying like a baby. I was scared to death," says Hanna, who was vacationing in New York when police reached her. "I was so far away. And it's my mother."

Hanna had registered her mother with the Alzheimer's Association Safe Return Program, a nationwide, round-the-clock identification system. In its 12 years, 100,000 people have been registered with Safe Return, and it has helped locate more than 7,500 of them.

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