It Can Be a Heart-wrenching Process..

Patsy extends her hand. I take it, shake it and say nice to meet you. But she’s already halfway down the brightly lit hall, to where photos line the walls.

Photos of soldiers serving in World War Two. Photos of young girls in flowing prom dresses. And a photo of Patsy as a carefully coiffed, smiling young woman.

“I was Miss North Carolina,” Patsy says. What she doesn’t say is that she recalls those days more clearly than she recalls yesterday. She makes this trip down Memory Lane regularly because, some 50 years after the Miss North Carolina photo was shot, Patsy suffers from dementia.

Patsy is one of 34 patients who spend full weekdays at Alzheimer’s Family Day Center, a $1.2 million-per-year operation located in an office building in Fairfax. At AFDC, patients eat, play, make Christmas ornaments, pass time with each other. All have a fatal illness, but you wouldn’t know it from Patsy’s enthusiasm or the smiles of her fellow late-stage Alzheimer’s patients.

“These people are dying a little bit every day,” explained Nancy Dezan, executive director of AFDC. “But these people have fun. We dance, we sing. They have a very high quality of life.”

AFDC is a longtime partner of United Way of the National Capital Area. During the current calendar year, donors across the Washington area will have given the agency about $44,000. Slightly more than $21,000 will have gone for general operations. The remainder will have gone for physical therapy.

AFDC not only serves as a place for dementia and Alzheimer’s patients to spend the day. It also trains and supports family members, many of whom are dazed by the changes that the diseases cause in their loved ones.

One of the hardest changes for family members to handle, Nancy Dezan said, is the tendency of Alzheimer’s patients to live farther and farther in the past, as Patsy does.

It can be a heart-wrenching process. One elderly woman at AFDC mistakes her husband for her father, because she thinks she’s 14 years old. Another patient has forgotten the names of her children. Still another used to be a physician. Now she sits at a table, staring into space, with a half-smile on her lips.

“I have people here who are at a functioning level of a six-month-old,” Nancy Dezan said. Yet the average age of her patients is at least 65. Although AFDC charges each patient $75 a day, those funds don’t come close to covering the agency’s costs.

If she had additional funds from United Way donors, Nancy Dezan said she’d “try to do more for families,” especially where the patient is strapped for funds, or penniless. In 2006, she said, she budgeted $30,000 to subsidize people who couldn’t afford AFDC’s services. In this calendar year, that figure will have swollen to $190,000.

AFDC would also like to move to a larger space, and do more training for family members who support Alzheimer’s patients. United Way funds would support expanded efforts in both of those areas, Dezan said.

Patsy is back at a table now. She and 11 other patients are coloring Christmas decorations. It’s obvious that all of them are suffering from what Nancy Dezan calls “gentle confusion.” But they are safe, they are dry and they are eating bagels cut into eighths.

“If they stayed at home all day and stared at the walls, they’d go downhill very quickly,” Nancy Dezan says. Thanks in part to United Way donors, they don’t have to do that.