When a Mind Begins to Disappear: A Young Family's Journey to the...(the healthy man she married. What r...),Health

"What really drew me to Jim," she says, "is that he enjoyed life so much. He's a lively person, who loves to play around... So when he started to lose some of his motor skills, when his legs first gave out, I thought he was kidding. And I would say, 'Come on, Jim! Stop playing! And he said, 'I'm not playing around.' And it was like a knife through my heart."

She remembers clearly "the first time he said he didn't know who I was, during the first year, before I even knew he had Alzheimer's. I really thought he was kidding. But he wasn't. And then he started to forget the names of the kids. And that hurt. They didn't understand what was going on."

Financially, the impact has been disastrous, as Jim's construction career came to a permanent and abrupt halt. "So we had no income," he said. "We had to use all our savings. We lost our house, we lost our car, we lost everything that we worked for."

They now subsist on a fixed disability insurance and Social Security. They also lost their private health insurance. Medicare pays for some of Jim's Alzheimer's medications --such as Exelon and Namenda-- as well as the antidepressant Prozac. "But still," Michelle says, "the prescriptions are too much. So we have to get prescription samples from doctors to get by."

The Muellers say the disease has also affected the very nature of their relationship.

"Basically, instead of me taking care of everything, she does," he acknowledged. "We've switched roles. It's as if I'm not here sometimes. My wife has to make the decisions, because I can't."

But Jim reserves his greatest heartbreak for the toll the disease has taken on his girls.

"They know dad's sick," he adds. "So they don't push me like they used to. I do see them all the time, which is good. But it's not the same. They kind of leave me alone. But they're very smart kids... They've been very helpful and thoughtful, and th
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