A Bit of Relief for Alzheimer’s Patients, Families : Disease: Day-care centers operate special programs for sufferers and allow relatives to go on with their lives.

Several years ago, Judy Kerstetter faced a difficult choice: Keep her job or stay home and take care of her mother, who has Alzheimer’s disease.

The degenerative brain disorder was getting worse. Kerstetter could no longer leave her 79-year-old mother home alone because her mother wandered. But Kerstetter wanted to keep her job as a claims representative for a company that sells and services motorized wheelchairs.

Then Kerstetter found an adult day-care center operated by Intergenerational Services Inc., which provided therapy to Alzheimer’s patients.

Kerstetter put her mother, Marty Young, in the center shortly after it opened in 1988.

“She was with other people. She was socializing,” Kerstetter said. “She was very happy because she was entering into activities during the day that had a purpose.”

Then, in June, 1990, Intergenerational closed because Nationwide Insurance said the service did not qualify as psychotherapy under Medicare guidelines. Three days later, staff member Connie Hunter opened a day-care center for Alzheimer’s patients in her home.

Kerstetter’s mother was the first client.

“Families were devastated when we closed,” Hunter said. “Most of the families did not want long-term care or they would have put them in nursing homes. They counted on day care.”

Hunter, who has worked with the elderly for 20 years, uses many of Intergenerational’s programs. Alzheimer’s patients reminisce, sing, exercise, draw and, most of all, have fun.

Five to 10 people come to her house each day. No part of her home is off-limits.

“It is a sad disease if you concentrate on the things they are losing. But if you concentrate on what they still have--to hear them laugh, to hear them communicate with each other--you will look at the disease differently,” Hunter says.

She operates one of the few adult day-care centers in the nation with special programs for Alzheimer’s patients.

“Day care is very important,” said Nina Fouts, who ran Intergenerational’s day-care center. “Our center enabled a lot of families to continue to work and continue with their own lives.”

Kerstetter credits day care for helping to stabilize her mother’s condition.

“It’s not an improvement in the disease--you’ll never see that--but we’ve seen no decline in my mother’s functional ability,” she said. “I attribute that to day care.”