The Early Signs of Alzheimer's: What Richmond Families Should Know This World Alzheimer's Month
Most families wait a year or more after they first notice something’s wrong before anyone says the word out loud. September is a hard month to keep pretending you haven’t.
Your dad has told the same story about his old fishing boat three times this week. Not the warm kind of “he always tells that one.” The kind where he looks at you, mid-sentence, like he’s sharing it for the first time. Your mom got turned around leaving the grocery store she’s shopped at for twenty years and called you from the parking lot. She wasn’t panicked, exactly. She was just… lost. And you’ve been explaining it away for months. Stress. Normal aging. He’s just tired.
September is World Alzheimer’s Month. Today, September 21st, is World Alzheimer’s Day. The question you’ve been circling finally sits in the middle of the table: is this something more than getting older?
Getting an answer sooner matters more than most families realize. A diagnosis does not slam a door. It opens a few that stay locked if you wait until you’re “sure.” Treatment. Planning your parent can still take part in. Support that people who keep watching and hoping usually miss.
-
This is the part that keeps people stuck. Some memory changes really are just age. Others aren’t. And when it’s your mom or your dad, love makes the line harder to see, not easier.
Ordinary aging often looks like this. They forget a name, then it comes back later that afternoon. The glasses end up on the counter, then on the counter where they always are. Decisions take a little longer. A bill is late once. They tell a story twice because they enjoy telling it.
What usually deserves a doctor’s visit looks different. They ask the same question several times in one conversation and have no memory of asking it. They get turned around somewhere that should be automatic — the church they’ve attended for years, the grocery store down the street, a drive they’ve made a hundred times without thinking. Keys turn up in the refrigerator, and they can’t walk themselves back through the morning to find them. A task they’ve handled for decades starts to fall apart: paying bills, following a recipe they could do in their sleep, driving a route they know by heart. They stop going to the things they used to look forward to. Judgment around money shifts in a way that doesn’t sound like them — a scam that would have made the old version of them furious, a large gift that doesn’t add up, payments that used to go out like clockwork and now don’t.
None of that means it’s Alzheimer’s. It could be a medication, a thyroid problem, depression, an infection, something treatable that has nothing to do with dementia. The point isn’t to diagnose your parent from the passenger seat. The point is to stop calling it “just aging” long enough to let a doctor look.
-
Families put off the appointment because a diagnosis feels like bad news with nowhere to go. That used to be closer to true. It isn’t now.
A diagnosis is what makes treatment possible. Blood tests cleared in 2025 can help identify Alzheimer’s-related brain changes earlier, and with a draw instead of a spinal tap or a scan. There is a small, growing group of medications meant to slow decline in the early stages. None of that is on the table for someone who has never been evaluated.
It also lets your parent stay in the conversation. Power of attorney. A will. Advance directives. Where they would want to live if their needs change. Those documents hold up better, and they sit better with families later, when your parent was the one who made them while they still could. Waiting often means those choices get made for them, in a hurry, after a fall or a hospital stay.
You get a real timeline instead of a guess. Families who know what they’re facing can think a year or five years out. Families who don’t tend to make every decision in a hospital hallway, with no sleep and no time.
And you find out you are not the first people in Richmond to go through this. Support groups. Care navigation. Someone who can talk through what “the right level of help” actually looks like for your parent — not the version on a brochure.
-
It does not mean the next stop is memory care. Most people diagnosed with early-stage Alzheimer’s or another dementia stay at home for a long time. Sometimes years. A little help with medications. A caregiver a few days a week. A few safety changes around the house so the stove and the front door are less of a worry.
A diagnosis is not one decision. It’s the start of matching care to what your parent needs now, then adjusting when that changes. That matching is easy to get wrong from the outside. It’s a lot easier with someone who has walked a few thousand Richmond-area families through the same stretch of road.
If you’re seeing the signs
Call the primary care doctor first. Not a specialist. And be specific. “He’s a little more forgetful” is easy to wave off. “He’s asked me the same question four times in one phone call, twice this month” is harder to ignore.
Go with them if they’ll let you. Doctors catch patterns faster when someone who lives this every week is in the room.
Ask for a referral if needed. If the doctor treats it as normal aging and your gut says otherwise, ask about a referral to a neurologist or a geriatrician. You are allowed to ask. Memory concerns get filed under “getting older” more often than they should.
Start the quieter conversations even before there’s a name for what’s happening. Where would they want to live if things change? Who do they trust with the bills? Those talks are awkward at the dining room table. They are much worse in an ER.
The first call is usually the part people dread. That’s normal. What a lot of families say afterward is that the not-knowing was heavier than the answer, whatever the answer turned out to be.
None of this is easy. Knowing early just gives you and your parent something waiting never does: time, and a say in what happens next.
ViaVera helps families in Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield understand what a dementia diagnosis means for their family, and what care can actually look like — now, or years from now. Our help is always free to families. Reach out when you’re ready to talk through what you’re seeing and what to do next.
