I dunno if anyone caught this. Didn't see it posted here.

[JSUCamel]

http://punctualityrules.com/2008/03/19/match-it-for-pratchett/

Here’s a slightly off-topic announcement for you. I’m assuming that you all love to read, and that many of you love sci-fi and fantasy books as well. Well, Terry Pratchett (author of the Discworld books) recently came forward with the announcement that he has Alzheimer’s. He’s donated approximately a million dollars to Alzheimer’s research and his fans are trying to match that. They’ve only been collecting for something like four days and are up to about $70,00 (35,000 British pounds) … So!

I have a special hatred of Alzheimer’s, since it’s what (finally) killed my grandfather back in 1967, before they really knew what Alzheimer’s was. My grandmother took care of him until the end–and she luckily had great neighbors and relatives who helped out–but it was enormously difficult. On the rare occasions Dad mentions it, he’ll say that my grandfather almost took her with him, it was so incredibly hard. So, yes, I’m definitely supporting this one, for the grandfather I never got a chance to know.

You can donate to the Match it for Pratchett site or to the Alzheimer’s Research Trust directly. Oh, and there are t-shirts, too. Whether you ever read the man’s books or not, it’s a good cause, folks. Or even just promote it on your own blog to spread the word. Do you know that they’re predicting that 18% of all baby boomers will develop this disease? That’s one in five people out of an entire generation. Talk about scary. Match it for Pratchett!

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Sucks. Alzheimer's sucks.

[Crispin's Crispian]

Thanks for posting this, Camel.

Alzheimer's is one of those diseases that often gets more jokes than sympathy, but it's pretty awful. The memory loss with which everyone is familiar is just a symptom of the larger issue, which is that the brain is actually deteriorating and ultimately regressing back to a infantile state. It's not quite that simple, but the result is that advanced stages of Alzheimer's involved complete loss of voluntary function, and eventually involuntary, too.

I don't know that much about it, but the stories I've heard take the fun right out of any Reagan memory jokes.

[Davian93]

Thanks for posting this, Camel.

Alzheimer's is one of those diseases that often gets more jokes than sympathy, but it's pretty awful. The memory loss with which everyone is familiar is just a symptom of the larger issue, which is that the brain is actually deteriorating and ultimately regressing back to a infantile state. It's not quite that simple, but the result is that advanced stages of Alzheimer's involved complete loss of voluntary function, and eventually involuntary, too.

I don't know that much about it, but the stories I've heard take the fun right out of any Reagan memory jokes.


I believe someone may have posted it on Yuku but it got buried in the new formatting there.

[Zaela Sedai]

I posted about Pratchett's diagnosis, but not about this fund raising. Awesome, thanks Camel.

[ShadowbaneX]

My grandfather has dimentia, which is fairly closely related to Alzheimer's. It's painful to see the man who took the training wheels off your first bike and taught you to ride it look at you like he's got no idea who you are.

[Terez]

One of my great-grandmothers had Alzheimer's...she called me by my mother's name, and she called my mother by her mother's name, and years after my parents divorced, she would always ask my mom where my dad was when we went to visit. We didn't see her at all in the last year of her life, so I'm sure she probably got to the point where she wouldn't have remembered us at all. Very sad stuff. :(

[Sei'taer]

I read a story about Reagan once, told by one of his secret service guards. He loved to go out every morning and clean out the pool with a dip net at his house. As his alzheimers got worse, that was one of the few things he remembered. The Secret Service guys would go out while he was getting dressed in the morning and throw leaves in the pool so he could come out and enjoy the sun...one of the few times during the day he actually went out. I thought it was a really nice story.

[Ishara]

That breaks my heart a little bit and I didn't even think I liked Reagan...

[Davian93]

That breaks my heart a little bit and I didn't even think I liked Reagan...

Reagan was a genuinely good guy even is alot of people disagreed with some of his policies. He did alot of good for our country and gave us 20 more years of superpowerdom which we wouldn't have had had he not been elected in 1980. People forget just how weak our country had become after Vietnam and how far down the military had sunk until Reagan's rearmament plans and modernization.