Beverly has Alzheimer's.
It doesn't look or feel any better for being blurted right out.
I wish it were just a tentative diagnosis awaiting MRIs and other tests for confirmation, but the examining doctor at the hospital's memory clinic was pretty sure about the results of her preliminary tests, and wanted to give us the facts in a straightforward manner along with advice on how to deal with the information. A representative from the Victoria branch of the Alzheimer's society was present to contribute as well. Now what?
Some of you have already walked this path or you are now on it. We have the advice that says;
Eat healthy
Stay physically active
Stay socially active
Stop or reduce alcohol
Keep the mind engaged
So, mostly the same stuff we're doing. The drinks have to transition to non-alcoholic wine, but we can manage that, and I don't especially like kale, but I'm willing to stuff it in there somewhere. Beverly's social life has always verged on the manic. (Hmm says who?? I don't like that…)
Where I prefer a beer and a few sports or fish-related conversational grunts now and again, she has worked in two or three activities and meet-ups and projects - usually before lunch. (so?)
Things shifted a few years ago around about Covid time. Have you noticed how that pandemic has become a landmark time now? Well B had two bowel sugeries and a knee replacement in there as well as the isolation. I got to be chief chef but I had a solid foundation in that area with my single-parent experience to call upon and my repertoire of recipes served us well - a tad heavy on the hamburger perhaps, but the pasta and pizzas (and beer) offset that. And I just kept on doing it - without the kale.
Gotta keep the wise cracks in. Gallows humour, some would call it, and it's not about me. That's what I need to keep telling myself. OK, Beverly, talk to our friends.
I don't need an invite! As you all know! and I"m so grateful for Derek, in soo many ways! You all know who he is too,for me!!
And as always, I go to research, in the firm conviction that information will help. There's the Alzheimer's Society branch here in Victoria and the hospital has a Cognitive Stimulation Group at their seniors' centre, and they both offer information sessions and activities. And I haven't phoned them yet, two weeks after the diagnosis. I will, I will.
At a time like this, facing an unpleasant diagnosis, we all want to know if we could have avoided it. Some studies have shown that bilingual individuals and dancers have very low incidences. Like appreciating the music of the band on the Titanic, it's a little late to start doing those things as prevention, but for the sheer fun of it, go for it.
I did retrieve Jay Ingram's text The End of Memory from somewhere in our clutter and found one remarkable passage, too late for any help now, but worth sharing for everyone with young people in their sphere. "The Nun's Study" examined 678 teaching nuns (School Sisters of Notre Dame) in the US in a longitudinal study.
Some of the women who died at advanced years (90s and 100+) showed little cognitive deterioration even though their autopsied brains had the definitive markers of "plaques and tangles" of classic Alzheimer's. What set them apart?
Well, their youthful essays written on their entry into their order were available and revealed a remarkable quality. Written at ages 18 to 20, these simple autobiographical pieces had one statistically outstanding quality relative to later brain health - idea density.
Researchers also checked for grammatical complexity, but found no strong correlation. They're self-explanatory terms, but I'm an old aging English teacher and so I just have to unpack them for you.
How many discrete ideas and how many sub-clauses (or phrases) were used by the authors? You count the words in a sentence and divide by the number of ideas and you get an idea density score. Then count the number of sub-units in a sentence to get a grammatical complexity index.
The young novitiates who wrote autobiographies with high densities of ideas survived into advanced years without the cognitive decline of control groups even though some of their brains, upon autopsy, showed the classic Alzheimer's markers. Biology (autopsied results) said they should have developed dementia; in-person-derived test scores said otherwise.
Of the two features being rated, only idea density displayed the correlation with aging brain health. I once had a university prof in a writing class who intuited the significance and I stole everything he taught me for my own later composition classes. You can too.
We were assigned this exercise. Take any page from a piece of writing by George Bernard Shaw - the prefaces to the plays would be a good starting place - and take a unit of examination such as 500 words or a page of text. Now make two counts, one for the number of sentences and two for the average number of sub-units (phrases or clauses or appositives) per sentence. We all found as you might have guessed that Mr. Shaw was a master of the nested sentence.
Some in the class used other 19th century authors and even early 20th century ones (such as George Orwell) and found similar results. These writers crafted sentences of amazing complexity, able to highlight a main idea while surrounding it with elements denoting situation and time and place and contrasting positions. Look at this one, for example:
I read Dickens and Shakespear without shame or stint; but their pregnant observations and demonstrations of life are not co-ordinated into any philosophy or religion: on the contrary, Dickens's sentimental assumptions are violently contradicted by his observations; and Shakespear's pessimism is only his wounded humanity. Both have the specific genius of the fictionist and the common sympathies of human feeling and thought in pre-eminent degree. They are often saner and shrewder than the philosophers just as Sancho-Panza was often saner and shrewder than Don Quixote.
(GB Shaw; Man & Superman)
This feature is sentence complexity, but it has idea density as well. I taught young people how to embed ideas in their writing and they scored in the 80s on government essay exams when the provincial average was 68. But, I'm a long way now from Beverly. Avoidance gets us nowhere.
I'll leave this with the poem I wrote years ago from the perspective of an Alzheimer's patient. We two have had a good run and we are grateful - for each other and the many friends we've brought into our lives and for the good times we still have together.
Forget-Me-Nots
Some anniversaries, I know, have slipped my mind
though every moment marked is warm within
the hand in hand by day,
the nestling night.
I may forget some times that car keys go
beside the door, not with the cutlery,
or how you take your tea,
which way to home.
I won’t recall, in times to come, your face
that our life long so lifted up my heart.
When I forget then, who you are,
what you have been for me,
oh please,
remember who I was.