Paulikas had grown more attached to her husband as the disease progressed, becoming anxious if they were separated and reluctant to leave home without him. Moody had heard this advice, but wandering hadn’t particularly worried him. The advice typically given to patients and caregivers of people in the early stages of Alzheimer’s is that it’s not a question of if a person with the condition will wander away, but when. He darted quickly down a nearby staircase, used the bathroom, and returned to meet Paulikas. Moody escorted Paulikas to a women’s restroom on the museum’s second floor and then looked for the men’s room, which turned out to be situated a floor below. Moody had helped her choose that day’s jeans and a bright-red top, with blue Skechers sneakers that were comfortable for walking.Īfter several hours at the museum, they prepared to leave. A photograph taken at lunch shows Paulikas, who was then fifty-five, with glasses and curly, shoulder-length brown hair, looking at the camera with a quizzical half smile. With the couple were Moody’s relatives, who were visiting from Colorado. That’s not Nancy.”īut, at the museum, her demeanor was calm. “It was a real horror show for several of our friends. She was walking away from the group, and she was upset,” Moody recalled. “Nancy didn’t want to have anything to do with it. A day earlier, they had spent a difficult afternoon at a park with old friends who hadn’t realized how quickly Paulikas, a former software engineer, had deteriorated. But, since Paulikas’s diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s, the year before, it had become hard to say how an outing might go. Museumgoing had been among the couple’s many hobbies in retirement, along with travel, hiking, and gardening. Nancy Paulikas and her husband, Kirk Moody, arrived at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on October 15, 2016.
0 kommentar(er)
