Faces of Alzheimer‘s and those that love them. Xmas 2023.
Faces of Alzheimer‘s and those that love them. Xmas 2023.
I am posting one book per day from my extensive to-be-read collection. No description and providing no reason for wanting to read it, I just do. Some will be old, some will be new. Don‘t judge me - I have a lot of books. Join in if you want!
#ABookADay2023
Faces of Alzheimer‘s. Almost all of us have known or know someone who has had/has this disease. If not, you will. There is no way to prepare yourself for it when it presents itself. Not with books you‘ve read, documentaries and movies you‘ve watched. I know this because I‘m there. Working in hospice has taught me a lot, and the time spent with my patients who had/have Alzheimer‘s and then Dementia—doesn‘t phase me. I am just there with ⬇️
so-soI kept thinking something would be revealed or there would be a shocking end. Nope. It was a good story that built up then 💥 it was over with no real point of closure. I was disappointed and left hanging.
This has been on my TBR shelf for a couple years after I bought it in our library used bookstore for $1. Finally pulled it off the shelf and started it.
pickShown: my dad and step mom. I saw the movie adaptation and loved it. I felt the book even more deeply. It was well written, and heart breaking. Many of us love someone who had Alzheimer‘s. If you don‘t know someone yet, you will. Progress is being made in the medical treatment—new drugs are approved, and a vaccine is underway. This book is the story of that same journey. You will feel the sadness, the anger, the frustration, the despair.
Even then, more than a year earlier, there were neurons in her head, not far from her ears,that were being strangled to death, too quietly for her to hear them. Some would argue that things were going so insidiously wrong that the neurons themselves initiated events that would lead to their own destruction. Whether it was molecular murder or cellular suicide, they were unable to warn her of what was happening before they died.
More and more, she was experiencing a growing distance from her self-awareness. Her sense of Alice – what she knew, and understood, what she liked, and disliked, how she felt, and perceived—was also like a soap bubble, ever higher in the sky, and more difficult to identify, with nothing but the thinnest lipid membrane protecting it from popping into thinner air.
Alice watched and listened to the relentless, breaking waves pounding the shore. If it weren‘t for the colossal seawall constructed at the edges of the properties of the million-dollar homes along Shore Road, the ocean would have taken each house in, devouring them all without sympathy or apology. She imagined her Alzheimer‘s like this ocean at Lighthouse Beach—unstoppable, ferocious, destructive. Only there were no seawalls in her brain to
