Hello everyone, thank you so much for taking the time to share your opinions, experiences, concerns, and even your prayers. I can't reply to every comment individually, so I'm answering all of you here at once.
P.S. To the grammar/spelling detectives, thank you for solving the biggest problem in the world 🙈😜 I hope you all get well soon.
Now, let me tell you a bit more about our situation. I'm a Filipina from Cebu, and I've been married to my American husband for 21 years. He's 77 and I'll be 44 soon 😉 Yes, it's a big age gap. We have no children and no close family in the US. My husband is retired and I care for him full-time. He isn't a veteran, so he doesn't qualify for state or program assistance like TRICARE/VA or Medicaid/Medi-Cal. Medicare doesn't cover Alzheimer's care. I also don't qualify to be paid as his caregiver through the state (IHSS). (In my case) Social Security doesn't give me anything either just because I'm my husband's caregiver. I've talked to 5 social workers about whether there's any help available, but no, there was nothing. Yes, healthcare is better here, but in my experience that's not the case for this disease. My biggest worry right now is giving my husband the best care and quality of life without ending up homeless, and making sure I don't get sick or injured myself. Thank you again for your time. Now I have to make a big decision all by myself. 🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼
Hi, I'm Mari. Is there any Filipina wife here who is taking care of a spouse with Alzheimer's? I'm currently living in the US and I'm seriously thinking about taking my husband back to my hometown in the Philippines. I've been caring for him since 2019, and it's getting harder and harder. Finding a helper is impossible, and I don't want to put him in a care facility. Do you have any advice? Thanks in advance.
My wife works in an Alzheimer's unit at a nursing home. Some days she comes home from her shift completely exhausted. If you need help and the Philippines is the only place you can get it, you need to prepare. Don't put it off too long, it only gets harder as time goes on. Good luck.
It wasn't Alzheimer's, thankfully, but my mother was in a similar situation 15 years ago. She needed someone with her 24 hours a day, and she lived at the end of a 1,200 driveway in the mountains of New Hampshire. The agency that cared for her the year before charged $14,000 a month and said they wouldn't go back up that driveway the next winter. So in October I brought her here to a 5th-class municipality in Mindanao. I hired four college graduates for 24-hour care at $100 each per month, $400 total. Plus a doctor who came to our house once a month, an hour from the provincial capital, for $100. Total $500 (maybe double now??). It worked out very well! Except for my wonderful wife, who quietly took on the burden of organizing the helpers, feeding them every shift, and somehow miraculously cooking whatever my mother wanted to eat at every meal. Caution: the big problem was that my mother was cut off from her friends. Now with Facebook Messenger it may not be such a problem. Bottom line: it's quite doable at relatively low cost. Good luck.
I'm not being sarcastic, I'm genuinely curious, what's wrong with care facilities? My elderly relatives in Japan are in care facilities and they wear their own clothes and are well looked after. Of course, it's early-stage dementia so they can still use the toilet. Still, my cousins don't have to worry about them getting lost or turning on the gas stove. The elders don't have to adjust to different food, culture, and language, and there are no foreign staff members who are sometimes hard to understand.
Please see my long comment above. Fortunately my mother was close friends with Walter D. Knight, who lived nearby. He was a famous physics professor and dean at UC Berkeley, and he got Alzheimer's. His wife cared for him as things got harder over five years. When he died she was completely 'burned out' and had a nervous breakdown, and it took her over a year to recover. So when help was needed, she had no qualms about seeking it from outside the family. Yes, it's 'in sickness and in health,' but there are limits. Please get help. Don't wreck your own life being there for your husband's final days.
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