CareNotes

OHCA’s Walt Dawson Publishes Article on Alzheimer’s in JAMA

OHCA’s Walt Dawson recently published an article in JAMA titled “Winning the Fight to End Alzheimer’s Disease.” The article discusses Walt’s life-long personal fight to end Alzheimer’s Disease. Read the full article here.

I was 8 years old when my father, Cecil Dawson, was diagnosed as having Alzheimer’s disease. Receiving a loved one’s diagnosis of a fatal degenerative disease is always traumatic; however, my mother and I were completely unprepared for what lay ahead of us. My father regularly began to wander, becoming lost in familiar places and unable to find his way home. Before long, my mother and I were unable to care for my father and decided we needed to place him in a memory care community, a special type of secured residential housing for people living with Alzheimer’s disease or other types of dementia. It was at this memory care community that my father would spend the remaining years of his life.

Read the full article here.