But amid all that unknown, it’s something to hold onto. With the biomarker, though, she feels at peace. She had hoped that doing something to help move the science forward would help her process her mother’s disease, that it would relieve the feeling of helplessness. The results were also bittersweet, she said, in that the good news also meant she couldn’t participate in the trial. Zevola couldn’t convince her mother that she did, in fact, have Alzheimer’s - that a doctor told her so almost a year ago. So was her mom: “Maybe that means I won’t get it either,” she said. And finally, in mid-July, months after she’d had her blood taken, that was exactly what happened. She could envision picking up the phone, the voice at the other end telling her she didn’t have the biomarker. She had something like a premonition, she said. There was her 91-year-old dad, still sharp-minded and healthy, “losing his wife before his eyes.”Īnd then, still weeks before the results arrived, she suddenly felt calm. There was the change in her personality, from relentlessly chipper to hyperfocused on the negative. A glimpse of the future How It Ends: From You to the Universe Chris Impey 2010 W W Norton £18.99/26. If that was the case, she was already getting an idea of what might be in store, from watching what happened to her mother. A positive result would give her a chance to plan - if she developed the disease, it might still be decades away. The researchers had prepared prospective participants to wait as long as eight weeks for their biomarker results to come in. “He will be afraid to do things on his own.” “I think he will break down and quit doing the things he’s doing if he finds out he definitely has it,” she said. Just as she sought agency through knowledge, she thinks, he’s holding on to independence by staying in the dark. Even though I’ve only had it installed for a couple days, it’s really made Safari that much more of a pleasure to use. It’s not often I find a program or add-on that I immediately feel the need to tell people about, but I’m compelled to spread the word about Glims. ![]() ![]() Her brother, who’s 73, began taking medication for memory loss two years ago, but he’s told her he wouldn’t want to be tested. One such example is Glims a free plugin packed with useful features. But she knows not everyone wants to know one way or the other. Kistner turned out not to have the biomarker - a shock, she said, and an immense relief, even though she knows it doesn’t mean she definitely won’t get Alzheimer’s. “I don’t want to be a burden like that for my family,” she said. Knowing she didn’t want to live with the disease, she asked someone close to her to “hand me a bottle of pills so I can go to sleep” should she be diagnosed. Toward the end of her career in social services, she worked as a care manager for Humana and regularly saw the inside of nursing homes she knew she didn’t want to wind up in one.
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