It was their morning routine. Fern Giron would take her husband, Guadalupe Giron, to a senior center for breakfast while she went to church. He then would walk home, collecting aluminum cans along the way.

The walk was necessary exercise diagnosed to keep his heart healthy, and the cans were an obsession he had developed from his Alzheimer's disease.

Fern Giron always worried her husband would get lost, but she never thought his sickness was that severe. On one hot morning in July 2008, Guadalupe Giron never found his way home.

Fern's husband of 53 years, who she lovingly referred to as Lupe, wandered through the El Rancho area with no sense of where he was going.

Fern came home after an hour away from her husband and found an empty house. She immediately called her daughter, Lorinda Burleson, and they searched for six hours. It was the longest six hours of their lives.

"I thought somebody had kidnapped him," Fern Giron said, because she knew how friendly and innocent her husband was.

Lupe Giron had been an active man in his younger years. He worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory for 30 years and raised cattle in his spare time. Burleson, one of his three children, remembers him building a teeter-totter without ever telling them what he was doing.

"Playtime was always something to cherish with him because he worked so much," Burleson said.

The development of Lupe Giron's disease began in 1986 when he fell from a horse and landed directly on his head. He suffered severe internal bleeding and lost most of his speaking abilities. Over the next 10 years, he slowly lost his memory and never fully regained his speech.

After six hours of searching that July day, the family called police. They were hesitant in calling because they thought law-enforcement officers couldn't search for a missing person until
24 hours had passed. Alzheimer's patients and children are the only exceptions to that policy.

After 11 hours, eight law-enforcement agents and a helicopter still hadn't uncovered a trace of Lupe Giron. They worried that if night fell, they wouldn't be able to find him or, if they did find him, he would be dead. Luckily, an off-duty fireman heard the search on his radio and happened to find Lupe Giron under a tree wearing a winter jacket, extremely dehydrated and nearly 8 miles from his house in Pojoaque.

The only thing Lupe Giron had for hydration was the leftover liquid from the cans he came across on his 8-mile hike.

Lupe Giron's illness had progressed significantly in the five years before he wandered away from home, but Fern Giron never thought it would get to that point.

For years, she managed his restlessness at night by making him watch TV while she deadbolted the doors so he wouldn't wander in the cold. She would keep him from driving by hiding the keys to the car. Over time, she accumulated a bucket full of keys, as he would keep making duplicates.

"We jumped many hurdles trying to stay ahead of him," she said. "Sometimes we could, sometimes we couldn't."

Despite the devastating impact the disease had on her husband, Fern Giron was lucky enough that Lupe Giron never forgot the faces of his loved ones as so many people with Alzheimer's do.

"It's a very cruel illness," she said. "It robs them of you, and it robs them of themselves."

One year after the wandering incident, Lupe Giron passed away. He spent the last six days of his life at the Alzheimer's clinic at Alta Vista.

Fern Giron had been able to be a responsible caretaker for her husband during the previous 10 years. But Fern Giron said that because it is common for Alzheimer's patients to become violent in the last stages of the disease, she checked him into the clinic. He passed away on Labor Day, an "appropriate day for him to go," according to his wife and daughter, who stressed the time Lupe Giron had put into his work. Fern Giron says she will always miss the old, physically active and energetic Lupe.

"I'm happy for him because he no longer has to go through what he was going through," she said.

More people affected

According to the American Health Assistance Foundation, Alzheimer's disease is an epidemic affecting
5.4 million people in the U.S. By 2030, the number of people age 65 and older with Alzheimer's disease is estimated to reach 7.7 million. By 2050, between
11 million and 16 million will be affected barring any medical breakthrough against the disease.

"The incidents of Alzheimer's disease are increasing rapidly as the population ages and as we get better at diagnostics," said Agnes Vallejos, executive director of the Alzheimer's Association of New Mexico.

The Alzheimer's Association of New Mexico has established clinics throughout the state — including in Santa Fe — where it provides training and education on living with people with Alzheimer's. It is estimated that 1-in-3 people knows someone affected by the disease.

The clinic in Santa Fe, 811 St. Michael's Drive, offers support groups and care consultation for people with loved ones affected by Alzheimer's.

"Caregivers are under a huge amount of stress," Vallejos said, "so we know that getting them some education and some training in being able to anticipate what is coming next is very helpful in mitigating some of that stress."

As Fern Giron and Lorinda Burleson learned in caring for Lupe Giron's Alzheimer's, there are different stages in the disease. It was a 10-year process that saw Lupe Giron go from a fully functioning person to one with no recognition of consequences for his actions. He was basically a toddler again, Burleson said.

"He didn't know right from wrong," Fern Giron said. "He didn't care. He was going to do what he wanted to do."

One of those things was to wander.

Support for caregivers

Wandering is a hallmark of Alzheimer's patients. Sometimes it stems from issues related to anxiety, but it mostly stems from the patients' need to move and the sense that they have things to do. At the same time, they often forget where they are going or what they are trying to do, Vallejos said.

In an effort to keep track of the millions affected by Alzheimer's, the Alzheimer's Association developed the Project Lifesaver program, which helps track wandering patients using a GPS bracelet.

Project Lifesaver provides equipment to track patients to local law-enforcement agents. That way, if someone calls 911 reporting the missing patient, that patient can be tracked more easily. The project does not go beyond training law-enforcement agents and giving them the equipment for tracking.

The program exists in nine New Mexico counties, according to Agnes Vallejos of the Alzheimer's Association. Santa Fe County is not one of them.

According to Santa Fe County Sheriff Robert Garcia, an effort to start the program in Santa Fe County more than five years ago never got off the ground.

After Lorinda Burleson went through the terrible ordeal of searching for her father nearly four years ago, she was happy to hear that a program like Project Lifesaver existed. But, she was equally disappointed when the family found out they couldn't use it to protect Lupe Giron from wandering incidents in his last year of life because they lived in Santa Fe.

"If we had had that ability to put a bracelet (on) that tracked him, we could have found him right away," she said of the day her father was missing for more than 12 hours.

Contact Nico Roesler at 986-3084 or nroeslersfnewmexican.com.