Center Aids Families of Alzheimer’s Patients

For Lorraine Byrnes, the burden of caring for her mother, whose condition has been diagnosed as Alzheimer’s disease, is a nearly full-time task she embraces out of a sense of love and duty.

“It’s hard to accept, a parent becoming a child,” Byrnes said. “But my mother raised us in the struggle of the Depression, and so I have to do this for her.”

Several times a day, Byrnes walks the two blocks in Hawthorne from her home to her mother’s house, where she bathes, feeds, dresses, medicates and cleans up after her 81-year-old mother, Anna Victor.

A strong woman who worked at a metal hinge factory until the age of 72, Victor will now sometimes ask her daughter for breakfast only a few minutes after eating the meal. She will hide food in her room, collect empty milk containers and fruit peelings, and accuse her daughter of stealing clothes when Byrnes takes them to be washed.

“It’s getting harder all the time,” Byrnes said.

Two days a week, however, the burden of care is temporarily borne by Gardena’s Senior Citizens Day Care Center, where Byrnes leaves her mother in a facility newly equipped to accommodate mentally impaired aging men and women.

“This gives me a two-day relief so I can breathe,” Byrnes said. She also credits the center with helping her to avoid placing her mother in a nursing home.

This month, the Gardena center became the first day-care facility in the South Bay to be state-certified as an Alzheimer’s Day Care Resource Center. Although a handful of other day-care programs in the South Bay accept Alzheimer’s patients, the Gardena center is the only one specifically staffed and equipped to handle advanced cases, said Pat Rubaum, the center’s program coordinator.

Alzheimer’s disease, which affects an estimated 2.5 million Americans, is a progressive neurological disorder that attacks brain tissue and results in impaired memory, thinking and behavior.

The presently incurable disease is primarily diagnosed through a process of elimination, although positive tests are becoming increasingly reliable. Currently, confirmation of the terminal illness can only be made by performing an autopsy.

The Gardena center has accepted Alzheimer’s patients among its participants since opening in 1981, but the recent state designation and accompanying funding will allow it to accommodate a larger number of people suffering from advanced stages of the disease.

The state grants are designed “specifically for moderate to severe levels of disability, severe cases being defined by aggressiveness, wandering, incontinence, disruptiveness and eating problems,” said Ellie Hufmann, manager of the state’s Alzheimer’s branch in the Department of Aging.

Using a $60,000 grant, the Gardena center has renovated its facility on the grounds of the Loving Shepherd Lutheran Church on Crenshaw Boulevard. The church allows the city of Gardena to run the center there at no charge, Rubaum said.

Because people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease often wander about, a fence has been constructed around the entire complex, which includes an outdoor recreational area. In addition, a sensor system will activate a warning buzzer if patients wearing an electronic bracelet pass through the doors of the buildings, Rubaum said.

A second state grant of $60,000, which is renewable annually, enabled the center to hire certified nurse’s aides for the first time and expand its daily capacity from 18 to 25 participants. About 50 people are currently signed up to use the facility, with their schedules ranging from one to five visits a week, Rubaum said.

Rubaum estimates that half the people who use the center suffer from some stage of Alzheimer’s and that half of those have moderate to advanced cases of the disease or other comparable brain disorders.

At the start of the month, when the facility became certified under the state program, five new Alzheimer’s patients were accepted into the center, Rubaum said. There is rarely a long waiting list to join the program because turnover is quite high, due primarily to medical problems that prevent people from attending, she added.

The center charges families according to their ability to pay, with fees starting at about $5.25 per day.

Although senior day-care centers routinely accept people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, those individuals whose conditions degenerate into advanced stages are eventually asked to leave the centers, said Wayne Friedlander, who directs a mental health resource center at the University of Southern California’s Andrus Gerontology Center.

The Salvation Army in Torrance runs the only other senior day-care center in the South Bay that readily accepts moderate to advanced Alzheimer’s patients, said Paula Sova, director of the center. However, Sova said she has had to ask some participants to leave because the facility is not properly staffed to give the individual attention required in certain cases.

The state started special funding for Alzheimer’s disease day care in 1985. There are now 36 sites in the state, including seven in Los Angeles County.

The primary goals of the program are to allow the relatives or spouses of the Alzheimer’s patient a respite from the constant responsibility required of them and, in the longer run, to enable the families to keep the affected individual at home and out of a nursing home, Hufmann said.

The centers also organize support groups for the care-givers and provide resource materials on medical, social and housing questions.

Elizabeth, a 69-year-old woman from South-Central Los Angeles who brings her husband to the Gardena center twice a week, said the program gives her an opportunity to have lunch with a friend and take care of errands.

“I feel isolated with just the two of us. . . . Now we can’t go out to meals with friends because there is no conversation. He can’t tell them what he’s thinking,” said Elizabeth, who asked that her last name not be used.

After 34 years of marriage, Elizabeth can no longer carry on a normal conversation with her 77-year-old husband, Fred, who forgets common words. Fred also has trouble dressing himself and will try, sometimes two or three times in an evening, to put on one set of pajamas over another.

Last September, doctors diagnosed Fred’s illness as Alzheimer’s disease. “I can see a change for the worse on a daily or at least weekly basis,” Elizabeth said.

“You have to learn to adjust; otherwise you cry all the time,” she said. “My love doesn’t change. I have to remember--I know that this is not the same person I married. This is the disease that has affected him.”

Like Elizabeth, Lorraine Byrnes said the Gardena center’s care-giver support group is useful for venting feelings and for hearing other people describe what might happen in their own houses as the disease progresses.

Byrnes first brought her mother to the Gardena center three years ago, about a year after the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s was made. While her mother is in Gardena, Byrnes uses the time to throw out garbage that her mother hoards and also to live her own life for a few hours. Without the center, Byrnes said, “I’d be lost.”

Byrnes, whose husband works in the aerospace industry, previously worked as a proofreader and layout artist. But with the responsibilities of her mother’s care, Byrnes no longer has the time for an outside job.

For now, Victor can live in her own house, which she shares with her twin sister, because she has no tendency to wander, Byrnes said. As long as her mother’s condition does not deteriorate dramatically and Byrnes can get some help from the day-care center, she can avoid placing her mother in a nursing home.

“When you get them out in the nursing home, they just kind of give up,” Byrnes said. “I want to maintain my mother in her home as long as possible, with the dignity I think she deserves.”