Pick Your Bad News

Giving It A Name

Alzheimer’s Disease.

Maybe it is. Maybe it ain’t. Maybe she’s diabetic. Maybe she’s just eighty-two years old.

If it is Alzheimer’s, we’ve had a doctor tell us that she’s got three to five years to live. That’s assuming that something else doesn’t kill her. Heart attack. Stroke. Pneumonia. Some weird blood disease that I haven’t heard of.

It’s easy to pick Alz because it’s a popular disease. Popular in that there’s a lot of money researching it and trying to develop cures. A new medicine is hitting the market this month that supposedly cuts down on the cognitive collapse associated with Alz. Whether or not we would be able to get it prescribed for Aged Mother would depend on whether we could get her to see a doctor. And we do need to get her to a doctor anyway. We need to have something that will keep her asleep on those nights when we’re no longer fresh enough to serve her without anger. There’s nothing available over the counter that will do that.

Alz means that her brain will shut down, a bit at a time, until there’s not enough of it left to run her body. As that happens she’ll forget – where she is, what she’s doing, who we are.