When Can I Go Home?

Joseph J. Sivak, M.D.
Niagara Press (2010)
ISBN 9780615314891
Reviewed by Richard R. Blake for Reader views (03/10)


Alzheimer’s Association reports indicate that 5.3 million Americans are afflicted with this disease. This suggests that another 10 to 15 million family members are directly impacted by anxiety of this debilitating disease. “When Can I Go Home?” is Dr. Joseph J. Sivak’s account of his mother’s affliction with Alzheimer’s and his own memoir of becoming a primary caregiver at age seventeen.

Sivak describes how his own grief and losses have helped him in relating to patients and understanding their pain. He tells how being a “wounded healer” has enabled him to heal others while unable to heal his own pain. He treats his patients with empathy and as suffering individuals.

Throughout the book Sivak talks with loving respect of his parents and their parenting skills. He emphasizes the importance of this influence on building character, self-worth and direction and ways in which he hopes to instill this in his own son. He speaks of his sense of guilt and the emptiness of being homeless after his mother entered the nursing facility.

Sivak’s writing resonated with me. I joined him in his tears and the feeling of frustration at the cruelness of onlookers, perfect strangers, rude in their lack of understanding toward the magnitude of a caregiver’s role and the helplessness and inability of the afflicted Alzheimer’s patient to maintain any level of dignity. I recognized the isolation felt by family members and empathized with his patient Sam’s delusion regarding the curative powers of Aricept and other medications being espoused by the media as new discoveries as a result of the pharmaceutical companies’ latest research. I appreciated Sivak’s vulnerability in allowing the reader to look into the introspection of his own heart and psyche as hope was replaced with disappointment, pointlessness, and a sense of shame.

“When Can I Go Home?” is unique in that it reflects a parallel viewpoint of Alzheimer’s from a contemporary physician, who also was called on to become the primary caregiver to his own parent as a teenager. Sivak’s journey began in the year 1979 as a high school student. He summarizes his college experiences, changes in his family relationships, his school friendships, academic challenges and the emotional anguish he faced throughout his struggle to discover his own self identity. He gives behind-the-scenes insights into his medical school training and the evolution of change taking place within the medical profession.

Joseph J. Sivak, M.D., has written this book in hopes of providing insight into the relationship and interaction of family members, physicians, and the victims of Alzheimer’s in a societal environment filled with misconceptions and biases regarding the disease. “When Can I Go Home” is a book for family caregivers, health providers, and counselors. The narrative is broad in scope and personal in its message.

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