CBS News correspondent Natalie Morales has been opening up about the importance of brain health, revealing how it “hits hard” now that she’s the same age that her late mother-in-law was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
In an interview with People, the 53-year-old journalist recalled the experiences of her mother-in-law, Kay Rhodes, who lived with Alzheimer’s for 17 years before she died in 2017 at age 70. She talked about noticing the early signs and how, at the time, tests weren’t as extensive as they are these days.
While Kay had been having memory issues, including getting lost in her neighborhood and repeating herself, Morales said the “lightbulb moment” was when she couldn’t remember where she’d hidden her and husband Joe Rhodes wedding bands.
“We had to get new wedding bands,” Morales told the outlet. “It wasn’t until after she died, when my father-in-law was going through her personal effects, that he found the wedding bands in the back of her sock drawer.”
Kay was officially diagnosed two years after her symptoms first appeared, and the family did the best to support her. “At that point, there wasn’t really much in the way of disease-modifying therapies or treatments for us,” Morales said. “So, what we did as a family was really surrounding Kay with love, offering caregiving support.”
Morales now works alongside the medicine company Lilly, where she encourages families to talk to their doctors about early signs of dementia.
“You have to have those conversations and that’s why I wanted it to be involved,” she stated. “Talk to your doctor. I really want people to feel empowered and not be afraid of what could be a horrific diagnosis.”
The former The Talk co-host also admitted “it hits hard” now that she’s the same age Kay was when she was first diagnosed. Morales said she is now much more on the ball with her health, especially her brain health, and recalled a recent experience in which she forgot her hotel number and had to ask the concierge for help.
“I mean, I am a perimenopausal woman, and I’m dealing with memory fog, but I’m always asking myself, ‘Is this normal?’ Because again, my mother-in-law was my age. She was 53,” she explained.
She added, “I can kind of laugh a little bit about it now, but there was a moment of fear for me. Sometimes we take on so much that we need to take a step back and ask ourselves what’s normal, what’s not normal. I mean, those minor cognitive issues, they can amplify.”
Morales, who shares two children with Joe, said, “Because early symptomatic has a stronger genetic risk, it’s something that my husband and I talk about with our kids. The importance of brain health, exercising daily, eating and drinking all the right things, exercising our brain as a muscle… These are all things that we need to be more aware of doing.”
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