Elva works as an accountant for a busy kitchen manufacturing business by day, and as one of a family of carers for her father, Richard, at night and on weekends.

Richard is 84 and a former leading real estate agent who now has Alzheimer’s disease.

Richard’s family – wife Eileen, daughter Elva and son Thomas, care for their father at home, but feel the time is fast approaching when they will no longer be able to manage.

“Dad has become very possessive of, and dependent on, mum and really does not like anyone else caring for him,” Elva said.

“But mum is in her 80s herself and the stress of fulltime care is exhausting her and leading to health problems. She can’t even get out to a doctor’s appointment without a massive planning effort. The minute she is gone – no matter who is there – dad starts pacing up and down demanding to know where she has gone and when she will be back. He gets worked up into a terrible state and by the time she returns home, he is highly distressed and sometimes becomes angry and abusive.

“What my brother and I try and do is organise to take him out somewhere special before mum leaves the house, but that is problematic, too, as he hates to have his routine disrupted and he gets very disorientated as soon as he leaves the familiarity of home.

“He doesn’t really enjoy an outing and often, even when it has been planned in advance and talked about and he has agreed to it, he will refuse to go at the last minute. Of course than all hell breaks loose when mum needs to go to her appointment. It is so upsetting for everyone.”

Elva is concerned for her mother’s health, with a major operation already cancelled three times because of care or health issues coming up for her father. She and her brother both work full-time and have children of their own to care for, but have a great affection for both of their parents and are determined to help in whatever way they can.

For Elva, this means spending every second weekend at her parents’ home, cooking meals in advance for the week ahead, doing housework and spending time with her father so that her mother can have a small break tending to her vegetable garden, or visiting a friend, which she loves. Her brother visits their parents on the alternate weekend.

Elva calls in to see her parents each night on the way home from work and often this leads to a much longer stay than she’d like: “Things seem to happen and help is needed, so of course you stay to do it,” she said. “Dad may be refusing to take his tablets and grabbing the bottles and tipping them out all over the house, or he may have had a major accident with his bowels, so mum needs help cleaning the mess up.”

Elva said the first real indication that her father had a problem was when a neighbour found him wandering in the street, unaware of who he was and what he was doing there. Prior to that he had been getting increasingly forgetful, but the family put it down to general ageing.

Eventually, a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease was made and Richard’s condition has been deteriorating rapidly ever since.

“Often he doesn’t recognise us at all and I find myself thinking that this is just a shell of a person – the man who was my father has gone. And then sometimes, out of the blue, from somewhere deep within him, a spark ignites and he looks at me with love and recognition and says something clever or witty, or remembers something quite complex like a favourite recipe, and I am stunned that my dad is still locked in there. It is both sad and painful to see him in this state.

“But increasingly now he yells at my mum and demands to know who she is and what a stranger is doing in his house. He has even run outside to stop a passing car to ask for help because ‘there is a strange woman in there abusing me’. You have got to laugh or else you’d cry.

“Another time he called 000 to get the police to come to the house as he told them he had been taken hostage by a ‘bad woman’. When the police arrived mum got quite a shock as she had no idea he had called them. Dad talked to them quite rationally and they weren’t sure who to believe. In the end mum had to call the family lawyer who spoke with the police officer. We laugh about it now but at the time it was quite traumatising.”

Elva said that the family had tried a respite facility for Richard so that everyone could have a break for a weekend and attend her daughter’s 21st birthday party.

“On the night of the party we got a call from the respite facility to say that dad had scaled a high concrete wall and absconded. We spent the night searching for him in the cold and the rain, but couldn’t find him,” Elva said.

“We called the police who brought in the SES the next morning and launched a full-scale search. It was terrible and we were all feeling so guilty. They eventually found him curled up under a big tree by a local stormwater drain. He got pneumonia and ended up spending time in hospital.

“Needless to say, we haven’t tried respite again!!!”

Elva and her family are checking out different aged care facilities to see what kind of quality of life they can offer a person with Alzheimer’s.

“We haven’t found anything we feel comfortable with yet. Some facilities are like a prison, with no safe outdoor recreational spaces, but others don’t have enough supervision or security,” she said. “It is breaking mum’s heart to be looking for aged care for dad, and he seems to be aware of what is going on, too, and has become quite depressed, so I am not sure what the future will hold for us all, but we all realise that something has to change.”