Jesus Sanchez, 32, was just 17 when his father started to get lost on his way to work.
“At first I thought it was just a phase but it was not until years later [that] my mom, brother and I realized it wasn’t a phase,” Sanchez said.
Everyday, families like the Sanchez’s live with the uncertainty and nearly silent onset of Alzheimer’s. Rates of Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia are on the rise in the Latino community. According to the Alzheimer’s Association’s figures for 2010, older Latinos are probably at least one and one-half times more likely than older white people to have these conditions.
According to the same figures, that rate will triple by 2030. “The stigma of Alzheimer’s makes it hard for the Latin community to reach out and ask for help,” said Alzheimer’s Association Physicians and Family Specialists/Latino Outreach Specialist Esther Wilson-Arias. “A lot of people prefer not to recognize the symptoms [and believe] that it is a normal part of aging.”
Sanchez and his 29-year-old brother help their mom on a daily basis with their father, who has been bed-ridden for the past five years.
In those years, the Sanchez family has played a constant game of trial and error.
“I would tell people that are going through this to embrace the change and go with the flow. I remembered when we went to the hospital and they told us that using a plastic spoon to feed my dad would be easier than a regular spoon,” Sanchez said. “That was such a big help, and if someone told us that earlier, we would have listened. The main goal is to provide good care for your loved one.”
2008 estimates put the number of people living with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia in San Francisco County at approximately 1,600, but Wilson-Arias says this number is incomplete because it does not measure the severe impact on families and caregivers that are affected by the disease.
Blanca Dominguez, 61, is one of those impacted family-caregivers. She has been taking care of her 82-year-old husband for six years. The couple has lived in San Francisco for over 30 years but the man she met while living in Mexico is not the same man that is living with her today.
“He is in bed 100 percent of the time, like a vegetable, but I love him,” she said. “Love is expensive.”
Dominguez still has faith that there will be a cure and has urged friends that are going through similar situations to ask for help. Right now, there is no cure and people still do not fully understand the disease. Arias-Wilson said even though the current number of people affected isn’t huge, it’s like a building tsunami that is coming, ready or not.