(no subject)

The treatments available for Alzheimer's disease, from the NIH Institute on Aging.

I keep seeing people saying that it's good that Terry Pratchett was diagnosed early, because then there's more the doctors can do to help, and I'm getting very tired of it.

I suppose it is good that he was diagnosed before he, for instance, started having trouble driving and got into an accident because no one knew they should be watching him closely so they would know when to take away the keys. Or before he started getting lost easily. I suppose since he's early on and still healthy he's a better candidate for clinical trials (although given that the last clinical trials of an Alzheimer's vaccine that had been very promising in mice turned out to give humans meningitis, this is not necessarily a good thing).

But take a look at what the NIH has to say about actual treatments for Alzheimer's: they don't have any medications that slow the progression of the disease. People on drugs die just as quickly as they would have if they weren't on drugs. All the drugs do is improve the symptoms for a while. So if Terry were diagnosed a year from now, the doctors would do for him what they're probably doing now: put him on Aricept or Reminyl, or Namenda if he's progressed far enough, tell him to take gingko and vitamin E because they're good for the brain, and try to do crossword puzzles since mental exercise helps preserve brain function longer. That's it. And the only difference it would make to him is that his symptoms would have been somewhat less if he had started the medications earlier.

Unfortunately, Alzheimer's isn't cancer. You can't make a terminal case better with chemo or radiation to help slow the disease down for a while. So while catching it early is probably better than catching it later, it doesn't give you more options in treatment, or give you the option of more good years. The medications give you more good months, and while that is certainly something to treasure when someone you love is disappearing before your eyes, it's not much in the grand scheme of things. It's certainly not a reason to tell yourself that it won't be as bad because they caught it early.

Okay, enough with the depressing fatal diseases already

I didn't mean to go on so about Alzheimer's treatements. It's just that misinformation makes me cranky. You're just lucky I didn't get started on all of the people going on about how it's the worst death they could possibly imagine (really? Worse than dying screaming in agony? Worse than dying of something like ALS where your body shuts down completely but you're completely aware the entire time? I won't say Alzheimer's is remotely easy, but the person who has it is pretty much unaware when the end comes and if you don't try to prolong their life, it's pretty peaceful).

Oh look, I did get started on it.

I guess what's going on is that I'm the first person to admit that Alzheimer's is a hellish disease for all involved, a disease of a thousand little deaths that prick away at the shell of a person who once was a vital, intelligent being until it finally ends it far too slowly. But as I read people mourning over Pratchett, I keep bristling as they talk about what they think Alzheimer's is like. Because that's my hell they're talking about, and my personal experience. Most of them don't actually know what it's like, they just know what they've heard, which isn't always terribly accurate. And even when I wouldn't dispute the accuracy of what they're saying, it feels like people intruding on something very personal and private. Those are still some pretty tender places they're stepping on.

Okay, I promise, I'm really done now.

I think we are in complete denial about the fact that we're moving in THREE DAYS. Currently, I'm sitting here working on the sweater for K that has consumed my brain lately; I don't want to do Ebay stuff, I certainly don't want to pack, I just want to knit. Our books are about half packed right now, and I threw some bathroom stuff in a box earlier today. We have a bunch of stuff that never really got unpacked which has mostly been moved over to the new house, so it can sit mostly unpacked in _that_ garage. But other than that? We're woefully underpacked when you consider that we rented a truck for Sunday.

The problem is that we've been lured by the siren song of the fact that we're only moving two miles and we have an entire month of overlap between leases. Theoretically, this means we can take stuff over in stages in a leisurely manner, hopping and skipping all the way. But I'm starting to be afraid what will actually happen is that we'll find ourselves late on December 30, shoveling our crap into the car for trip after endless trip as our belongings mate and multiply before our very eyes.

It's not too late to avoid this dire fate. I could start by closing the laptop and getting up and packing more books. Did I mention we discovered this week that there are built-in bookshelves in the rec room downstairs of our new house? And a totally cool fold-out desk in the wall.