Which Disease Do We Attack First?

Fate would have it that we didn't have a choice about which problem to attack first. Neither disease (my father's pituitary tumor or his girlfriend's Alzheimer's Disease) had a cure. Dad's girlfriend could not be treated with the latest drugs on the market to slow down the progression of the disease because her thyroid was out of whack.

Her thyroid got that way because she was not taking her thyroid medications as prescribed because of the Alzheimer's. She just could not remember having taken it or not. Once dad figured that out, he went out and purchased a weekly organizer for her prescriptions so that he could monitor them and be sure she took her medications each day. Even so, it took over a year to get her thyroid back in the range required to begin taking the Alzheimer's drugs. It just took too long.

Meanwhile, Dad's deteriorating health was keeping me up at night. I was scared to death. My dad was doing a very noble thing in caring for his ailing girlfriend, but he was doing it at the expense of his own life. With absolutely no help from her daughters, dad was completely on his own in caring for her. This is a daunting task for a much younger, much healthier person let alone for a man in his late 70's suffering from the affects of a brain tumor.