Just Love Me: My Life Turned Upside-Down by Alzheimer's (Purdue Series on Ageing & Care)

Rating:
Summary: Highly Recommended!
Review: A riveting account of Jeanne Lee's personal journey into the misunderstood world of Alzheimer's. Her story is sad, but allows the reader to get inside the mind of someone whose fears, frustration and worries about this mind-tangling disease provides a road map for us to be forever living in the moment. - Larry James, CelebrateLove.com, Author, "How to Really Love the One You're With"

Rating:
Summary: Waste of money
Review: Expected so much more from this book..a complete waste of money. Kept hoping it would get better but it never did! Read anything but this...you'll be glad you did.

Rating:
Summary: Wake up call for Alzheimer's Aawareness(she lives it)
Review: One could say that this book has a misleading subtitle: It would appear that Jeanne L. Lee's life has turned right side up because of her diagnosis of Alzheimer's.
She says it like it is for her, and much of what she describes is true for this reader who has come to grips with his own diagnoses of Alzheimer's, unipolar depression, obesity, kidney failure, alcoholism, emphysema, and now diabetics, all within the last two years.
Page after page she describes the various conditions of depression, alcoholism, dropping, forgetting, losing words, endless tests, denial by physicians, et al,, which plague all of us.
But thanks to the diagnosis, she is able to confront the denial of early continued sexual abuse, her own and her father's alcoholism, and multiple relationships.
The book is jumpy, and disjointed, but that is the nature of this species of dementia. Many of us demented ones have a huge sigh of relief, when all the eliminations are done, and the only culprit remaining is Alzheimer's,
This is not a book for those professionals who are determined to establish that those of us with the disease have no valid information to share with them. This is not a book for those who are only interested in working with the caregivers. This is not a book for those who say why do anything meaningful, since we won't remember the patterns anyhow. This is not a book for those who flaunt memory improvement exercises which deny the loss of the ability to learn. This is not a book for those who talk, but do not listen. It is a book for the rest of us.
Her main title says it all for this ALZer: "Just Love Me." But this love comes at a high price in the face of vincible ignorance.
We will talk, even if the words are jumbled. We will read, even if the continuity disappears. We will listen, even if the sentences disappear into a black hole. But most of all, we will love, even when we are not loved by those around us.
Lee has shown us the way out of our tunnels of loneliness and despair.
Lee says: "I know there are many people out there who neeeed to hear from others, like themselves, that it's okay to goof up; it's okay to do stupid things; it's part of what's happening to this body and brain. But it doesn't have to be all bad. There is so much good, and so much you can still do. So what if you can't remember somebody's name. You can still say hello to a little old lady. You can still give flowers to soneone . You can still look at the ocean [like I did on a Senir Retreat last week] and say, 'Oh God, I'm so lucky.'" And thanks to this book, that is exactly how I will spend my time remaining. Thank you Jeanne.

Rating:
Summary: A Must to Learn About the disease
Review: This book has been such an eye-opener that I gave it to friends. As a caregiver to my mother with late stage Alzheimer, it was such a revelation for me to understand what she was going through. When see the fear and frustration on my mother's face when she knows she should remember something or when she is pretty sure that what she just said doesn't make sense,I remember the title of Jeanne's to "just love" her. All the stories that the author tells of forgetting what she meant to add to the conversation or blanking on the alphabetical order are all things that I watched my mother go through. I would get so frustrated with my mother when she erratically think we were going some place else or ask about someone who is dead. Now thanks to "Just Love Me" My Life Turned Upside-down By Alzheimer's, I know to just give my mother a smile or a hug. I know she can still appreciate the beauty of a sunset even though she sometimes forgets my name. And I know that she never asked to have Alzheimer's and that it is much more painful for her than it is for me.