As was foretold, we've added advertisements to the forums! If you have questions, or if you encounter any bugs, please visit this thread: https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/240191/forum-advertisement-faq-and-reports-thread/
Options
Alzheimer's Sucks
CrackedLens
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Last night my grandpa was put in a psych ward. Due to his hostility, they are recommending him to a nursing facility and he will never go home again.
He had been showing signs of alzheimer's for a couple years and it has recently gotten to the point where he has started to lash out and get combative. Out of 10 brothers and sisters, 7 of them have died from Alzheimer's, he will be the 8th. He has been a cattle farmer his entire life and he has always been just a down to earth good ol boy. Now he doesnt even recognize his children and almost killed his cattle from overfeeding.
The thing that sucks worse is watching my mom try to deal with all of it. Her dad's mind is no longer there, so it is almost like watching him die. Now, she has to wait around to watch his body whither too.
It scares the hell out of me that this will happen to my mom and eventually happen to me.
SE++, what diseases and ailments scare you and keep you up at nights worrying?
CrackedLens on
0
Posts
Hopefully the medications will improve significantly by the time you or your mother get to that age.
We just put my grandfather in an assisted living facility because of his Alzheimer's, as well. I watched my great-grandparents deteriorate because of age and everything, but seeing what Alzheimer's has done to my grandpa is seriously saddening. My father's not a "crying" kind of guy, but the last time we spoke about it, he started to well up. Now I seriously dread going to visit my grandfather because I will seriously bawl.
sketchyblargh / Steam! / Tumblr Prime
i hate alzheimers
i think if i ever get it ill probably want to die
Secret Satan 2013 Wishlist
also, the ailment that terrifies the crap out of me is testicular torsion. it could strike at any time.
Fast forward to before Christmas. A nurse was tending a bloody nose he had and all of a sudden he socks her. The home tells my grandma that if he is going to be violent he can't stay there. He had to spend the holidays in a hospital psych ward. Fuckers are getting paid like $4000/month with the idea this is the shit they would be taking care of. He had no other history of violence and is back there now so all is good.
Lead to some fun stories about the old man at Christmas. Can't keep the old man down, still has fight left in him, etc, etc.
It is definitely a disease that takes its toll on the survivors. My mom is drained since her and her brother are the only children that really still go visit and try and do things with poppa. And my Grandma feels bad that she is not able to care for him. I on the other hand can not stand to be around him anymore. I have been to the home twice and both times it freaks my shit out. I try to talk to him but its not the same. As bad as it sounds, I think we almost hope he can go peacefully in his sleep.
So yah, feel your pain.
her father died of it too
we had dinner with her for the first time since I came back from college a few weeks ago - she seemed mostly fine, except that she kept making mistakes and asked me in a conspiratorial whisper if I wanted some ice cream with hot fudge sauce, as is the tradition at her house
by like the fourth time I was all "no thank you
sucks brah
he was doing the same thing, getting up and wandering around the house at night. my grandma has a weak heart so she cant go through the stress of worrying about if he was going to find the keys to the gun cabinet or the keys to the tractor.
they knew they had to do something when he started to threaten her.
so yeah, they are going to have to find a home that will take combative patients. and of course that is money out the butt
god it would suck to have alzheimers
it would be so sad
what are the symptoms?
it's when your balls wither and you forget how to be a man
basically you just act like a bitch all the time
The usual stuff. I have never smoked, but a lot of my family does so the whole lung cancer/second hand smoke thing will suck.
3DS FC: 5343-7720-0490
So yeah. That's all pretty great.
my grandpa was just cursed with alzheimer's a few months back.
when you couple that with the fact that he's deaf as hell, trying to talk to him is truly aggravating and depressing at the same time.
this is bristol.co.uk ^ | March 13, 2008 | Terry Pratchett
My name is Terry Pratchett, author of a series of inexplicably successful fantasy books and I have had Alzheimer's now for the past two years plus, in which time I managed to write a couple of bestsellers.
I have a rare variant. I don't understand very much about it, but apparently if you are going to have Alzheimer's it's a good one to have.
So, a stroke of luck there then!
This one had much better scenery, interesting and often very attractive inhabitants, wonderful wildlife and many opportunities for excitement and adventure.
Those of you who's last experience with computer games was looking at Lara Croft's buttocks might not be aware of how good they have become as audio and visual experiences, although I would concede that Lara's buttocks were a visual experience in their own right.
But in this case I was travelling through a country that was part of the huge computer game called Oblivion, which is so beautifully detailed that I have often ridden around it to enjoy the scenery and weather and have hardly bothered to kill anything at all.
At the same time as I began exploring the wonderful Kingdom of Dementia, which is next door to the Kingdom of Mania, I was also experiencing the slightly more realistic experience of being a 59 year old who finds they have early onset Alzheimer's.
Apparently I reacted to this situation in a reasonably typical way, with a sense of loss and abandonment with an incoherent, or perhaps I should say, violently coherent fury that made the Miltonic Lucifer's rage against Heaven seem a bit miffed by comparison. That fire still burns.
I want to go on writing! Admittedly, that means I have to stay alive.
You can't write books when you are dead, unless your name is L. Ron Hubbard.
And so now I'm a game for real. It's a nasty disease, surrounded by shadows and small, largely unseen tragedies.
People don't know what to say, unless they have had it in the family.
People ask me why I announced that I had Alzheimer's.
My response was: why shouldn't I?
I remember when people died "of a long illness" now we call cancer by its name, and as every wizard knows, once you have a thing's real name you have the first step to its taming.
We are at war with cancer, and we use that vocabulary.
We battle, we are brave, we survive. And we have a large armaments industry.
For those of us with early onset in particular, it's more of a series of skirmishes.
My GP is helpful and patient, but I don't have a specialist locally.
The NHS kindly allows me to buy my own Aricept because I'm too young to have Alzheimer's for free, a situation I'm okay with, in a want-to-kick-a-politician-in-the-teeth-kind of way.
But, on the whole, you try to be your own doctor.
The internet twangs night and day. I walk a lot and take more supplements than the Sunday papers. We talk to one another and compare regimes.
Part of me lives in a world of new age remedies and science, and some of the science is a little like voodoo.
But science was never an exact science, and personally I'd eat the arse out of a dead mole if it offered a fighting chance.
Fortunately, I have the Greek Chorus to calm me down
Soon after I told the world my website fell over and my PA had to spend the evening negotiating more bandwidth.
I had more than 60,000 messages within the first few hours.
Most of them were readers and well-wishers.
Some of them wanted to sell me snake oil and I'm not necessarily going to dismiss all of these, as I have never found a rusty snake.
But a large handful came from 'experienced' sufferers, successfully fighting a holding action, and various people in universities and research establishments who had, despite all expectations, risen to high places in their various professions even while being confirmed readers of my books.
And they said; can we help? They are the Greek Chorus. Only two of them are known to each other and they give me their advice on various options that I suggest.
They include a Wiccan, too. It's a good idea to cover all the angles.
It was interesting when I asked about having my dental amalgam fillings removed.
There was a chorus of ? hrumph, no scientific evidence, hrumph???., but if you can afford to have it done properly then it certainly won't do any harm and you never know.
And that is where I am, along with many others, scrabbling to stay ahead long enough to be there when the cure, which I suspect may be more like a regime, comes along.
Say it will be soon - there's nearly as many of us as there are cancer sufferers, and it looks as if the number of people with the disease will double within a generation.
And in most cases you will find alongside the sufferer you will find a spouse, suffering as much. It's a shock and a shame, then, to find out that funding for research is three per cent of that which goes to find cancer cures.
Perhaps that is why, for example, that I know three people who have successfully survived brain tumours but no-one who has beaten Alzheimer's???although among the Greek Chorus are some who are giving it a hard time.
I'd like a chance to die like my father did - of cancer, at 86.
Remember, I'm speaking as a man with Alzheimer's, which strips away your living self a bit at a time.
Before he went to spend his last two weeks in a hospice he was bustling around the house, fixing things.
He talked to us right up to the last few days, knowing who we were and who he was.
Right now, I envy him. And there are thousands like me, except that they don't get heard.
So let's shout something loud enough to hear. We need you and you need money. I'm giving you a million dollars. Spend it wisely.
much
a guy once documented his father who had alzheimer's in a really beautifully done website:
http://www.dayswithmyfather.com/
my dad is showing early signs of it, it's a terrifying disease
i'm afraid of anneurisms
cause of all the neuroscience and shit.
they just come out of nowhere, no symptoms
my friend's aunt died of one bringing the groceries in, then a year later, her 13 year old daughter died of one while playing basketball
the poor uncle had to deal with the loss of his wife, one daughter and is now probably terrified for the life of the other 2 kids.
a couple years ago he had prostate cancer and they planted some little radioactive seeds around his prostate as part of some chemo
we told him ass glowed like a lightning bug for a month
he usually gets a kick out of that
My personal fear is Myotonic Dystrophy; my mum had it ever since I could remember. She can barely walk around, and is constant danger of falling down on anything but level, non-slippery terrain, and she's almost always sleepy. I get sad whenever I see other mom's running around and playing with their kids, since I never had that experience.
Twitch (I stream most days of the week)
Twitter (mean leftist discourse)
by all means friendo
i am pretty active in the local Muscular Dystrophy Association, producing the telethon every year and doing events and what not
all that shit scares me too
i kinda do
but i still want to look good is all
no i'm kidding, i want to be old and surrounded with grandchildren
i want to be adorable and chubby with cute glasses and grey hair, i want to watch matlock during the day and draw pictures for my grandkids.
I have faith that scientific advancements will allow me to live a long long time without ever getting old
He was migrant laborer until his thirties when he scrapped enough money and education togather to become a barber and eventual own his own shop
He also made enough to buy two large houses in Santa Barbara as his family grew
As of today he's living in a shitty little house in Indio (cheap desert outside of Palm Springs)
After his other sons and daughters (Not my dad) begged, borrowed and outright stole every last penny out of both houses until they were foreclosed
And the only people my grandparents have for support are they same family members who took everything from them
That's what getting old means
Amazon Wishlist: http://www.amazon.com/BusterK/wishlist/3JPEKJGX9G54I/ref=cm_wl_search_bin_1
My grandpa died about a year ago from pretty much just failure of things. So it goes.
He lived his entire life (81) with a tricameral heart though (i'm not sure what the condition is properly called) and has been healthy because of regular exercise and whatnot which is rare.
Amazon Wishlist: http://www.amazon.com/BusterK/wishlist/3JPEKJGX9G54I/ref=cm_wl_search_bin_1
Early-onset AD
I forget which magazine I read it in (might have been an old copy of GQ), but there was an article about a 35 year-old guy who had been diagnoased; he was married, with a young (2-4 year-old) daughter, and will have no recollection of them within 5-8 years.
Only magazine article that has brought me to tears.
His daughter, my mom, recently passed because of ALS, which was pretty terrible to watch.
Im having a hard time deciding which scares me more, mental or physical atrophy.