Help my mom with Alzheimers

Thank you very much for looking at our campaign for our mom

I'm not too great with expressing myself at public speaking but I can get my point across when I write.

We are starting this campaign to help with my moms quality of life. She is someone I have always admired for her optimism in her life of adversity. We have always been a close family and still are to this day. My mom has always been a people person, wanting to help her fellow neighbor or person in need. She is a great mother to her 3 children and one step son. When she was diagnosed with Alzheimers at 67, she was living by herself in Raleigh, NC. I ( her son) was living in New Jersey and her daughter, Jennifer, was living in Chicago. I was the middle child but at the time the most stable in my life to take care of my mother. She has always given to her children to give them a better life or a happier one and my sister and I didn't hesitate to take care of our loving mother. She also has and still has a great sister and her family back in North Carolina that loves her deeply. They are always willing to do what they can to help us when we need it. We as her children couldn't ask for anything more.

We are starting this Gofundme campaign because my mom is currently in an assisted living in Toms River, NJ . She was moved there back in February of 2013. She was living with me from March 2009, until I started fearing for her safety and decided she needed to be supervised on a more 24 hour basis. This was a very hard decision for us which still makes me cry to this day, but I know she is safe which makes me feel at ease. In order for her to get into an assisted living she had to qualify for Medicaid/Medicare. She had very little money since she hadn't worked in over 10 years and was living off savings as well as whatever money my sister and I could give her monthly. This is where we need the help, Medicaid only pays for a shared room in assisted living, not a private room. I am grateful they would even pay for that, but due to my moms Dementia it was hard for her to have someone in the same room as her . She would become very confused about why the person was there or things would become missing, even though she would have been the one to move them, she would blame the room mate.

My mother is and always will be a sweet and caring person, but this disease has played tricks on her brain. This would be totally out of character for her to become angry, but I have seen it. This being said, the assisted living she is in now has asked me to move her because she cannot have a room mate and thats all Medicaid will pay for. I have checked with her social worker and there are NO programs that will help her with this EVEN THOUGH, its her disease that is causing this to happen. She is a very high functioning Alzheimers victim, what I mean by that is she is able to bath herself, feed herself and walk on her own, but she has alot of confusion sometimes and can't pick out the right words. She still to this day is a bundle of laughs and will be until the day she can't smile. She is not a candidate for a memory ward of an assisted living because she is so high functioning, she likes to talk and have a conversation with someone, even though it may not make sense all the time. She likes to tell a joke just to make you smile :-)

We have found a place that I can give her a private room and supplement it monthly. We want to do this for my moms quality of life, if she was worse off, I could understand but we want to keep her spirits up and mind working as long as we can. We want her to be involved in activities like everyone else.

The second reason we need the money is we want to start a foundation to help young people that are dealing with Alzheimer's with their parents. It was a long hard road trying to get answers, I was 29 and my sister was 26 when she was diagnosed. We want to create a foundation for people to be able to come to and get as many answers and help that they can with the disease. We also want to help Alzheimers victims when they are in the same situation as my mom. We want to embody a nonprofit foundation that is the essence of our mom, the kindness, laughter and we can get through it together vision.