Natalie Morales on Alzheimer’s and Caregiving

CBS correspondent Natalie Morales is 54, the same age her mother-in-law was when she received a devastating Alzheimer’s diagnosis. So when Morales experienced a memory lapse while on a recent work trip, she couldn’t help but fear the worst.

“I’m very well aware of when I have a memory lapse, whenever there’s a word I can’t think of,” Morales told USA Today in an interview this week. “Or if, you know, I know this person but… I can’t think of their name.”

On her trip, Morales forgot her hotel room number, spending minutes on the wrong floor tapping her key card against doors. “Oh my gosh,” she remembered thinking. “Either I’m overworking, or I don’t know what’s going on. Maybe I’m having perimenopause brain.” Of course, the thought of dementia also ran through her mind. Her mother-in-law, Kay Rhodes, died in 2014 after living with Alzheimer’s for years.

Morales doesn’t have dementia, but fearing it is understandable — once we get to a certain age, it’s hard not to. That’s especially true when it’s impacted your loved ones. “I think she was always a little bit afraid of getting that diagnosis,” Morales said of her mother-in-law. “And there was a little bit of that denial, although I think she knew better than anyone what she was feeling.”

The first signs, Morales remembers, were her mother-in-law having trouble completing tasks and repeating herself while speaking, along with anxiety and paranoia.

Rhodes’s struggle with Alzheimer’s also impacted the rest of the family. Rhodes’s husband was her primary caregiver and Morales says he felt the impact physically, emotionally, and financially. “With a lot of caregivers, you know, the more they invest in someone else and in that care, they lose themselves in that,” Morales reflects.

Now that Morales herself has some of those same Alzheimer’s fears, she’s both accepting and optimistic about the future. “We are at that age where these are things that we have to talk about and think about a lot more,” she said. But thanks to medical advancements, there are now more treatments than ever for people with dementia, including new medicines, better testing, and drugs that stop Alzheimer’s triggers. “The outlook,” Morales agrees, “is so much more positive now.”