Honoring a father’s journey with dementia – Alzheimer’s – Optimum Senior Care – Chicago In Home Care – www.OptimumSeniorCare.com
For more than 40 years, John Ziemba worked as a mechanical engineer across the Chicagoland area. When it came time to retire, Ziemba was looking forward to spending time with family, but when he was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia in 2010, family dynamics began to shift. His daughter, Natalie shares her story this Father’s Day and why she continues to fight to find a cure.
My family is and illuminates Chicago through and through. It is the city where my family has lived, where I grew up and where both my parents, Barbara and John were born and raised. Barbara (Barb) and John were married in 1965 and remained on the Southside of the city, raising all four children – my three brothers, Chris, Tim and Jon and me. I was, as my mother so affectionately says to this day, “the surprise baby.”
Throughout our lives, we all remained very close in proximity to my parents, though our education, career paths and personal lives took us along different journeys. We were a very close-knit family and could not imagine being apart for long.
For over 40 years, my father was a mechanical engineer. After an intense and challenging career, he was looking forward to retiring and spending time with family. However, in 2009 – things began to change. My family and I began to notice some behavioral and memory changes in Dad.
By 2010, our father was officially diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. However, we would later discover that the diagnosis was not completely accurate. Between the changes in Dad and family roles, we battled with the new challenge of being faced with an inaccurate diagnosis. Eventually, we found out our dad had frontotemporal dementia (FTD), which is a group of disorders caused by progressive nerve cell loss in the brains frontal lobes or temporal lobes.
After caring for dad at home for over six years, we were forced into making the decision that is all too often the case: placing our father into a long-time nursing facility.
We all take turns as a family to visit and care for our dad daily. I have been keeping a video diary of some of my time with my father. I am a firm believer in sharing both the good times and the bad as a way to inform, inspire and activate change to put an end to this heartbreaking disease.
I became involved with the Alzheimer’s Association in 2013 when I participated in my first Walk to End Alzheimer’s® in Chicago. I was recruited in 2014 to help on the Walk Planning Committee; it was at that point that I committed to becoming as involved with Alzheimer’s advocacy and activism as possible. Since then, I have participated in Walk for the past five years, increasing both my number of team members and fundraising year after year. In addition to Walk, I am also an Alzheimer’s Ambassador and participate in numerous events annually. I have attended the Alzheimer’s Association AIM Advocacy Forum in Washington, D.C. and met with elected officials, urging them to make Alzheimer’s and dementia a priority. I look forward to many more years of raising both funds and awareness for Alzheimer’s disease and other related dementia’s. I feel so incredibly honored and blessed to be surrounded by powerful advocates who believe in exactly what I do: finding an end to Alzheimer’s.
To see more of John’s journey, view Natalie’s video diary titled “Natalie, Dad, & Dementia.”
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