Bridge Magazine
Michigan Health Watch
July
29, 2019
Alzheimer’s
in Michigan: The coming storm
Wayne Goates visits his wife Kristie, almost every day in a Kentwood nursing home.
She is in the final stages of Alzheimer's. (Bridge photo by Ted Roelofs)
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KENTWOOD—Just about
every morning and evening, Wayne Goates makes his way to visit the woman he
fell hard for in college. From all outward signs, she has no idea who he is.
“The commitment and
the romance is still there,” Goates says of his wife, Kristie, who was
diagnosed with Alzheimer’s 13 years ago.
Conservatively, Goates
figures he’s put in at least 20,000 hours tending to his wife in the years
since her diagnosis. She has been in a dementia care wing of a Kentwood nursing
home nearly seven years, at $6,500 a month, with the total bill now running
past $400,000.
“I have some
investments and a pension and Social Security,” said Goates, 72, a retired
school administrator and, like his wife, a member of the post-World War II
baby-boom generation. “Little by little, the
savings are going away.”
Related: How Michigan can prepare for the coming
Alzheimer's crisis
And yet he considers
himself fortunate, in part because his Mormon faith tells him he and Kristie,
68, will be reunited as their whole selves one day.
“I have it better than
most,” he said one evening, as he spoon-fed his wife thickened apple juice.
Kristie sat in a wheelchair in a sunlit sitting area of the nursing home. Her
eyes briefly fluttered open for a time, but with no apparent recognition of her
husband or surroundings.
Wayne & Kristie Goates, shortly after she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s 13 years ago.
The cost of
Alzheimer’s in Michigan
The number of
those living with Alzheimer’s is expected to rise from 180,000 in 2018 to
220,000 in 2025. Experts say its toll will only grow.
·
517,000 family
caregivers for Alzheimer’s patients in 2018
·
589 million hours of
uncompensated care
·
$7.4 billion value for
uncompensated care
·
$1.4 billion in
Medicaid charges
·
More than $5 billion
in Medicare charges
·
4,428 deaths in 2017
Source: Alzheimer’s
Association
Goates acknowledged
the strain “can make some people bitter. This can be devastating financially.
For some people, it absolutely overwhelms them.”
In a state that’s aging faster than the rest of the nation, that’s likely to be the case for alarming
numbers of aging Michigan baby boomers – born between 1946 and 1964 – and their
families.
According to the
Alzheimer’s Association, a national advocacy group, the number of Alzheimer’s
patients in Michigan older than 65 is expected to climb from 180,000 in 2018 to 220,000 by
2025 – a jump of
nearly 16 percent and 40,000 people in seven years.
……. A significant
portion of the article about Alzheimer’s in Michigan deleted …….
For Wayne Goates and
his wife’s family in Kent County, Alzheimer’s has been a relentless destroyer.
That stretches back three decades to when the couple lived in Oregon, as he and
Kristie tended to her father in the last grim years of his life with
Alzheimer’s.
Kristie’s family would
learn it is among a small percentage of those with Alzheimer’s with a gene
mutation known to cause the disease. She has a younger brother and sister also
diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
Just over 13 years
ago, Wayne began to notice changes in Kristie.
“It was the location
of things. She was going to a
chiropractor 25 miles away and she asked me to draw a map. A few months later, she wanted me to take her
places. Later, she did wander off a time
or two.”
As Goates continued
his work as a school administrator, he dedicated more of his time in care of
Kristie following her 2006 diagnosis.
By 2009, he cut his
work to half time as he put in nine hours in the afternoon and evenings to care
for Kristie.
Following his
retirement, that care schedule grew to 12 hours or more, seven days a week. In
2011, they moved to Grand Rapids to share a house with one of their daughters
and her husband. He recalled a phase where Kristie restlessly paced most of the
day and he had to feed her while she was standing up and pacing.
After suffering
seizures and losing her mobility, Kristie entered the nursing home in 2012.
Wayne said he continued to spend about three hours a day with her, feeding her
breakfast, visiting her, and tucking her into bed at night.
He has bittersweet
memories of a particular morning about four years ago.
Goates recalled that
he kissed Kristie’s forehead after helping feed her breakfast, then looked back
as he walked away. Kristie managed to utter what sounded like the beginnings of
his name, “Way…”
It was the last verbal
communication he can recall.
In the evening, he
often reads her written memories from what he recalled and what he’s collected
from family and friends. That stretches back to the time they met at Brigham
Young University and the summer they spent in a forest lookout tower in the
mountains of eastern Oregon just after their marriage in 1973. It was a job he
held each summer as he worked his way through college.
“I finally had someone
I could share the sunsets with, watch the deer approach early in the morning
and see the moons of Jupiter. The sky was so dark you could see them with
binoculars,” he recalled.
In the meantime, he
said he tries not to dwell on what could be in store for his two daughters. By his calculation, their chance of getting
Alzheimer’s hinges on whether they inherited a particular gene from him or from
their mother.
“It’s 50-50,” he said.
As for Kristie, Wayne
said he does not consider their relationship to be over.
“It may sound corny,”
he said, looking over at his wife, “but I consider my care for her courtship
for the hereafter.”
