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Alzheimer's Patient Makes Emotional Plea to His Friends and Family

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This man with Alzheimer’s disease has a message for his friends and family.

Mary Beth and Alan Beamer, from Big Rapids, Michigan, posted a video to their shared Facebook account on January 3. In the video, Mary Beth asks her husband, who has Alzheimer’s, what he wants people, specifically his friends and family, to know about the disease.

Alan Beamer, calling the disease “one of the meanest things” he’s ever seen in his life, gets emotional while making a plea to his friends and family to visit and to see him as the person he was before the diagnosis. He and his wife say that people have stopped coming by to visit with Beamer.

They need to know that I’m the same old person,” Alan Beamer says in the video below. “I wish some people, my friends, would come up to talk to me just like you did before. You know, play and joke around… I know they’re afraid of me… I wish they’d come over, and they’d only have to stay for 5 minutes, or 10 minutes. We could talk about what’s really happening behind the scenes.”

See the full video below: 

Since the video was posted online it has been shared more than 6,000 times.

Correction: an earlier version of this post stated that Mary Beth and Alan Beamer were from Grand Rapids, Michigan. They are from Big Rapids, Michigan. 

h/t Fox 29

Originally published: January 8, 2016
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