Free Jan's Story by Barry Petersen Page A

rhythm as she slipped a touch here or there. I would notice it, she wouldn't. I kept it to myself and adjusted.
    I found myself making more and more decisions, and eventually I was making every decision for both of us, from organizing the next three-city visit to see family and friends in the US, to what we both might have as the main course for dinner.
    Also ending was the shared responsibilities for keeping the house going. Our bank account swelled for a few months and I couldn't figure out why until the Tokyo landlord called and said Jan hadn't paid the rent for three months. I took over the checkbook and paid all the bills. Another shifted responsibility.
    We put great faith in medicine in this day and age, and Jan decided that the pills and a positive attitude made the difference. I arranged for the pills, and the positive attitude flowed from deep within her spirit.
    The first medication stalled The Disease for a while. When The Disease started making new inroads, we switched to another pill. Once again, it slowed the progression and for a while brought parts of Jan back. I schooled myself about the existing medications and was disheartened at their limitations. Depending on the patient, they only work for a while, if at all. In the beginning I was hypersensitive to stories about trials of new experimental medications. But like everything else about The Disease, the trials ended with failure after failure, and my interest and hope faded for a new breakthrough.
    At first, I drew my ammunition from Jan's inborn optimism. If she believed we could beat The Disease, then I intended to believe with her, and it made me feel better. Sure, there were studies and terrifying statistics about Early Onset Alzheimer's Disease and how it caused dramatically shorter life spans. Alzheimer's can kill in anywhere from three to twenty years.
    But Jan and I were determined not to be just another statistic. And with help from the pills, there were times when it almost felt like we were indeed winning, which I defined as keeping The Disease at bay. We wanted a cure, but we would settle for just freezing the deterioration so she could live out the rest of her life where she was. Frankly, we would settle for anything positive.
    Reading about Alzheimer's also meant learning about caregiver stress, and how caregivers often die before the person with The Disease. I shrugged this off, thinking that this kind of mortality was more about elderly couples, about the eighty-year-old overwhelmed wife who dies from the stress and exhaustion of caring for her eighty-year-old husband. What I forgot was that caregiving was a new job that starts out feeling part-time and then grows to consume every hour you have, day and night, 24/7.
    And like so many other Early Onset caregivers, I already had a day job that needed doing, and it was the one that paid my salary. I was on call day or night if a broadcast needed a story. Since Asia is on almost opposite time zones from New York, it meant that I had to get up at midnight or 2 a.m. to return to the office and write a script if someone in New York needed something. And if we were covering a breaking story, it usually meant I would stay up through most of the night, grab what hours of sleep I could, and keep going.
    In 1997, we rushed to Guam to cover the story about a Korean Airlines 747 that slammed into a hillside on approach to the airport. I put in more than eighty hours straight without sleep, doing stories for the morning show, the Evening News, radio, and even a piece for 48-Hours . But it wasn't only the stories that needed to be covered. With cutbacks in network news, my Asia job was harder than ever. When I was first posted in Tokyo in 1986, there were four CBS News correspondents and bureaus in Asia: Tokyo, Beijing, Hong Kong and Bangkok. When I came back in 1995, Hong Kong, and Bangkok were long since closed, and the office in Beijing now consisted of just a camera crew. From four correspondents, we