I’ll be supporting!

To give others an idea how this nasty disease works, my wife has an M. A, Education, taught 38 years and is an avid reader. We met traveling and she actually exceeds me in number of countries visited, at 110 (then again, I’m not interested in visiting Belarus, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Syria anytime soon.

She still is an “avid” reader. But her comprehension has slipped and she asks about words’ meaning, she reads headlines and sometimes a sentence out loud to me and sounds like a second or third grader, enunciating syllables slowly and stumbling. It takes her a month or two to read a novel that she likes because she has read it several times before. (She only reads novels now, ones that she has read previously and liked.)

A couple of days ago, we went out to lunch at our favorite Thai restaurant (3 miles away) and onward to the supermarket we tend to patronize more frequently. We have shopped there weekly for nine years. As we pulled up into a parking spot directly in front, she asked “Where are we? Is this the bank or the market?” She reoriented as we entered, but...

No research, medication , diet etc. is going to help her. But if we can raise money to fuel much needed research into treatment, causes and prevention, perhaps we can hope... dementia, and particularly Alzheimer’s disease, may be to a future generation like poliomyelitis is to the current millennial. I grew up with polio - several of my childhood friends had it. Diana; Patty with a malformed leg for life; Virginia, with a tracheotomy scar you’ll notice if you meet her; Bert Kopperl, a famous Hollywood photographer who caught polio in the Philippines at the end of his army service in WW II, who spent time in an “iron lung” and never walked again (though he photographed the world from his wheelchair, because he was indomitable).

Please join me in supporting Mileage Love in our quest to end Alzheimer’s and other dementias.