When A Mind Drifts

Dementia is not forgetting a grandchild's birthday.  It is forgetting who they are.

Dementia is asking the same question.  Again.

Dementia is wearing slip-on shoes because you have forgotten how to tie shoe laces.  You are not likely to ever relearn how to tie them.

Dementia is asking when a person is going to visit when they have been dead for decades.

Dementia is asking when a person is going to visit when they left 10 minutes ago.

Dementia is asking the same question.  Again.

Dementia is not just losing your way.  It is never knowing the way in the first place.

Dementia is not remembering that you broke a bone in your foot.

Dementia is asking why your foot hurts all the time.

Dementia is a series of inappropriate responses.

Dementia is biting your nails.  Please don't bite your nails.  Dementia is biting your nails.  Please don't bite your nails.

Dementia is asking the same question.  Again.

Dementia is asking to go home.  The house in question was sold decades ago.

Dementia is swinging from cooperative to confrontational and back on a moment's notice.

Dementia is pouring your pills into the water cup instead of your mouth.

Dementia is wandering the house at all hours of the night.

Dementia is asking the same question.  Again.

Dementia is napping.  Until your companion naps, and then you are out the front door.  Woohoo!

Dementia is pouring water into your pill cup instead of your mouth.

Dementia is asking to go "home".  The house in question was sold decades ago.

Dementia is expecting kindness in every interaction while being unable to respond in kind.

Dementia is being concerned with modesty one minute and being stark naked the next.

Dementia is biting your nails.  Please don't bite your nails.

Dementia is thinking that your family has abandoned you.  Your family is standing right in front of you.

Dementia is wondering where the guy who was in your room earlier in the morning has gone.  It was your son.  He has a day job.

Dementia is removing the night light from the socket in the bathroom because "I have to turn out all the lights."

Dementia is not being able to see well enough at night to be able to find the light switch.

Dementia is asking the same question.  Again.

Dementia is not giving your family any good options while they are giving you the best options available.

Dementia is always closing the bathroom door despite being told to leave it open.

Dementia is wetting yourself because you forgot where the toilet is and the bathroom door is closed.

Dementia is asking the same question.  Again.

A modest postscript.  This was written over several weeks/months.  I started receiving spam emails for dementia-related services after I started writing but well before it was posted.  The emails started showing up at an email address not directly associated with this blog long before I published the piece.  With Google, we are the product, not the customer.

Saving The Future - Saving The Past

We all have personal perspectives and interests that motivate our efforts.  One of my personal perspectives is Alzheimer's or old age dementia.  I watched my grandmother disappear before my eyes.  I watched the husk that remained live on for close to five years.

If you can call that living.

I see the early signs of the same thing happening in my dad.  I experience some early-early signs of the same thing in myself.

It is not possible to look forward to the day when long honed perception and perspective disappear in time's grey haze without experiencing an inexorably rising sense of terror.

We do not currently have a cure for dementia.  One of the reasons why I so urgently advocate for a free market for health care is that other health systems stymie research and innovation.  The first costs to be cut in every nationalized health care system are those associated with the research of new technology.  The cost of providing existing technology to existing patients naturally declines over time as patents expire and product efficiencies are identified.

Future patients needing future technologies?  Current patients being maintained by current technology but hoping for a cure?  Lives unborn in need of a cure that does not yet exist?  Nationalized health care systems have a one size fits all response.

Fuck 'em.

Yet I still have reason to hope that our recently enacted plethora of federal boards, committees, directors, chairpersons, and other august personnel of medical wizardry may yet move slowly enough that a cure for my small concern may arrive before the gates of innovation are closed.

Via Glenn Reynold's Instapundit comes word of a recent discovery of a new application for an old anti-cancer drug.  The WSJ has a decent write-up as well.

A widely available cancer drug has shown remarkable success in reversing Alzheimer's disease in mice, raising hope of a breakthrough against incurable dementia in humans, US researchers said Thursday.

Mice treated with the drug, known as bexarotene, became rapidly smarter and the plaque in their brains that was causing their Alzheimer's started to disappear within hours, said the research in the journal Science.

"We were shocked and amazed," lead author Gary Landreth of the Department of Neurosciences at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Ohio told AFP.

"Things like this had never, ever been seen before," he said.

Faster, please.