Alzheimers

Alzheimer’s Disease: The Memory Killer

When I was fourteen years old my maternal great-grandmother suffered with Alzheimer’s disease. At that age, I did not really understand much about the disease and I honestly did not care much about it. I noticed that she often forgot things and did not want to eat when my Nana would feed her. I also noticed that with time, she did not get any better, just worse. I finally asked my Mom when my great-grandmother would get better and learned that she would not be getting any better and that she would probably worsen overtime. It was common for my great-grandmother to forget people’s names and think that people who had passed were still living. She often asked to go see her parents. I remember seeing the disappointment on my Mom’s face when she had forgotten her name. I never asked questions at that age even when people would use the word Alzheimer’s when discussing my great-grandmother. My great-grandmother went to sleep one day and slept for four days, she never woke up. Alzheimer’s disease took her life. After the funeral, I heard my Mom and Dad talking and learned that Alzheimer’s disease had also taken Mom’s other grandmother’s live about five years earlier. Even with that knowledge, I still wasn’t too concerned about disease. Then in 2009, my Dad’s mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. I was older and started paying more attention to my Granny’s condition. At first, the family blamed her memory problems on the medicine. But soon, like my great-grandmother, she too began to forget her own children’s names and often thought she was living in the house that she grew up in many years ago. She would ask several times a day where her parents were. I realized that with the disease on both sides of my family, it could strike my parents or even me someday. Although, there is history of heart problems on both sides of my family and cancer on my dad’s side of the family, Alzheimer’s disease...