Marty Williman is the face of the fight against Alzheimer’s here in Hancock County and has been for the past 16 years. She is a nurse having graduated from Madonna College in Michigan with her RN degree. She spent many years in the Home-care/ Community Health field in inner-city of Toledo. She moved to Findlay when her husband took a position at Liberty Benton.

In the 1990’s as a home health care provider she started to see the effects of Alzheimer’s on her patients. Her patients were living longer and she was seeing more cases of dementia. It was a disease for which there was no treatment and no cure and the fear of having it surpassed that of having cancer. When the agency Marty was working with closed she found a job opening that was a “God moment ” to her as it seemed to be written directly for her. She would be teaching home health aides about the disease.

While there is not cure there are some techniques being used to treat and comfort those afflicted with dementia. Instead of bringing them “back to our world we go into theirs.” There are 80 kinds of dementia with Alzheimer’s being the major one with 75% of dementia patients having it. Currently it is fatal and is one of the highest killers of our elderly in the world.

Mandy and her teams work with families one on one to teach, educate, help diagnosis and take over care giver roles to give families a break. Marty states, “We are blessed in Hancock county to have adult daycare centers, support groups and good providers.’