Terry Pratchett And Alzheimer's

[Griffo]

http://www.newswireless.net/index.cfm/article/3689

Such sad news...can't believe this hasn't been posted yet

I've only just started getting into his books so i have a lot of catching up to do (only on the second book) but i'm loving them so far.

[faceless]

I was going to post this but it slipped my mind...

b'dum tish?

no?

I've only read a few of his stories, but I've always wanted to get to the end to find out what happens, which isn't something I can say for most authors. Bat's a big fan of his stuff.

[6ULDV8]

On a more serious note:

Shame about this..

Anybody suffering, be they famous or not, is just sad news.

Hope that with the advances recently towards the understanding, prevention & medications that help retard Alzheimer's, things may not be as bad as they seem.

[Griffo]

I've never known anyone with this, but i can imagine it's one of them things where it's a lot worse for the people around them (family, friends etc) rather than the sufferer.

[Marcella-FL]

I love him! This really sucks! I hope he gets all those boks out of his brain and onto paper quick!!!

[Bat]

SCIENCE: A way of finding things out and then making them work. Science explains what is happening around us all the time. So does RELIGION, but science is better because it comes up with more understandable excuses when it's wrong. There is a lot more science than you think.

WINGS by Terry Pratchett

[6ULDV8]

[eefanincan]

[faceless]

I create gods all the time - now I think one might exist
By Terry Pratchett
21st June 2008

There is a rumour going around that I have found God. I think this is unlikely because I have enough difficulty finding my keys, and there is empirical evidence that they exist. But it is true that in an interview I gave recently I did describe a sudden, distinct feeling I had one hectic day that everything I was doing was right and things were happening as they should.

It seemed like the memory of a voice and it came wrapped in its own brief little bubble of tranquillity. I'm not used to this. As a fantasy writer I create fresh gods and philosophies almost with every new book (I'm rather pleased with Annoia, the goddess of Things That Get Stuck In Drawers, whose temple is hung about with the bent remains of bent egg whisks and spatulas. She actually appears to work in this world, too).

But since contracting Alzheimer's disease I have spent my long winter walks trying to work out what it is that I really, if anything, believe. I read the Old Testament all the way through when I was about 13 and was horrified. A few months afterwards I read The Origin Of Species, hallucinating very mildly because I was in bed with flu at the time. Despite that, or because of that, it all made perfect sense. As soon as I was allowed out again I borrowed the sequel and even then it struck me that Darwin had missed a trick with the title. If only a good publicist had pointed out to him that The Ascent Of Man had more reader appeal perhaps there wouldn't have been quite as much fuss.

Evolution was far more thrilling to me than the biblical account. Who would not rather be a rising ape than a falling angel? To my juvenile eyes Darwin was proved true every day. It doesn't take much to make us flip back into monkeys again. The New Testament, now, I quite liked. Jesus had a lot of good things to say and as for his father, he must have been highly thought of by the community to work with wood - a material that couldn't have been widely available in Palestine.

But I could never see the two testaments as one coherent narrative. Besides, by then I was reading mythology for fun, and had run into Sir James G. Frazer's Folklore In The Old Testament, a velvet-gloved hatchet job if ever there were one. By the time I was 14 I was too smart for my own God. I could never find the answers, you see. Perhaps I asked the wrong kind of question, or was the wrong kind of kid, even back in primary school.

I was puzzled by the fact that according to the hymn, there was a green hill far away 'without a city wall'. What was so unusual about a hill not having a wall? If only someone had explained ... And that is how it went - there was never the explanation. I asked a teacher what the opposite of a miracle was and she, without thinking, I assume, said it was an act of God. You shouldn't say something like that to the kind of kid who will grow up to be a writer; we have long memories.

But I'd asked the question because my mother had told me about two families she knew in the East End of London. They lived in a pair of semi-detached houses. The daughter of one was due to get married to the son of the other and on the night before the wedding a German bomb destroyed the members of both families who were staying in those houses in one go, except for the sailor brother of the groom, who arrived in time to help scrabble through the wreckage with his bare hands.

Like many of the stories she told me, this had an enormous effect on me. I thought it was a miracle. It was exactly the same shape as a miracle. It was just ... reversed. Did the sailor thank his god that the bomb had missed him? Or did he curse because it had not missed his family? If the sailor had given thanks, wouldn't he be betraying his family? If God saved one, He could have saved the rest, couldn't He? After all, isn't God in charge? Why does He act as if He isn't? Does He want us to act as if He isn't, too? As a boy I had a clear image of the Almighty: He had a tail coat and pinstriped trousers, black, slicked-down hair and an aquiline nose.

On the whole, I was probably a rather strange child, and I wonder what my life might have been like if I'd met a decent theologian when I was nine. About five years ago that child rose up in me again and I began work on a book, soon to see the light of day as Nation. It came to me overnight, in all but the fine detail. It is set on a world very like this one, at the time of an explosion very like that of Krakatoa, and in the centre of my book, a 13-year-old boy, now orphaned, screams at his gods for answers when he hasn't fully understood what the questions are.

He hates them too much not to believe. He has had to bury his own family; he is not going to give thanks to anyone. And I watched him try to build a new nation and a new philosophy. 'The creator gave us the brains to prove he doesn't exist,' he says as an old man. 'It is better to build a seismograph than to worship the volcano.' I agree. I don't believe. I never have, not in big beards in the sky.

But I was brought up traditionally Church of England, which is to say that while churchgoing did not figure in my family's plans for the Sabbath, practically all the Ten Commandments were obeyed by instinct and a general air of reason, and kindness and decency prevailed. Belief was never mentioned at home, but right actions were taught by daily example. Possibly because of this, I have never disliked religion. I think it has some purpose in our evolution.

I don't have much truck with the ' religion is the cause of most of our wars' school of thought because that is manifestly done by mad, manipulative and power-hungry men who cloak their ambition in God. I number believers of all sorts among my friends. Some of them are praying for me. I'm happy they wish to do this, I really am, but I think science may be a better bet.

So what shall I make of the voice that spoke to me recently as I was scuttling around getting ready for yet another spell on a chat-show sofa? More accurately, it was a memory of a voice in my head, and it told me that everything was OK and things were happening as they should. For a moment, the world had felt at peace. Where did it come from?

Me, actually - the part of all of us that, in my case, caused me to stand in awe the first time I heard Thomas Tallis's Spem In Alium, and the elation I felt on a walk one day last February, when the light of the setting sun turned a ploughed field into shocking pink; I believe it's what Abraham felt on the mountain and Einstein did when it turned out that E=mc2.

It's that moment, that brief epiphany when the universe opens up and shows us something, and in that instant we get just a sense of an order greater than Heaven and, as yet at least, beyond the grasp of Stephen Hawking. It doesn't require worship, but, I think, rewards intelligence, observation and enquiring minds.

I don't think I've found God, but I may have seen where gods come from.

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[faceless]

[faceless]

[faceless]

Alzheimer's patients missing out on help because of NHS cutbacks
Thousands of Alzheimer's patients are suffering because of widespread NHS cutbacks in dementia services, campaigners claimed last night.
By Sarah Knapton
02 Dec 2008

Almost one in three health trusts has reduced vital services such as district nurses and day centres while two in five trusts fail to provide any services at all, a survey by the Alzheimer's Society found. Around 700,000 people have dementia in Britain with the number set to raise to one million by 2025.

The survey for GP Magazine showed services may be getting worse despite the NHS budget doubling to almost £100 billion a year. Some 30 per cent of primary care trusts have closed or downgraded dementia services in the past three years including cutting the number of district nurses and shutting day centre. And 40 per cent of trusts said they did not provide any specific dementia service at all.

Neil Hunt, chief executive of the Alzheimer's Society, said: "The NHS is completely failing to face to the fact that we have a serious issue here, not just in terms of numbers but in terms of the terrible impact of dementia on an increasing number of sufferers or their families. If we were talking about cuts to services for another disease, such as cancer, there would be a national outcry, and the NHS would not be able to get away with it.

"What we need the NHS to do is to detect the signs of dementia, diagnose it early, break the news properly and offer sources of help. That is not happening. Patients have told us that early diagnosis helps them make plans and get support in place before things get really bad. Services have always been patchy across the NHS but to hear PCTs are cutting them back is too much."

The issue was recently thrown into the spotlight when author Terry Pratchett took a petition to Downing Street calling on more help for dementia patients. He warned Gordon Brown that Britain was facing a 'tsunami of Alzheimer's' unless more money is made available for finding a cure.

Emma Bower, editor of GP magazine, said: "Specialist services are vital to ensure people with dementia are identified early, and patients and families receive support. But our figures show that in many areas this is not possible because the services either aren't there or have been withdrawn. It leaves GPs in a very difficult position because they are unable to get their patients the help that they need."

A spokesman for the Department of Health admitted Dementia was one of the "greatest challenges" facing NHS and social care services. "That is why our national dementia strategy is so important," added the spokesman, "It will set out how we will improve the quality of life for people with dementia and their families, improve the quality of care dementia sufferers receive, increase awareness of the condition and ensure earlier diagnosis and intervention."

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[Brown Sauce]

It is my opinion, that the amount of "homes" will increase, but the care will not get any better.

I had an aunt who died in a home. The home took almost all of her money and assets. That included a house in Wimbledon. She died just before the assets ran out. Her home was of course once again on the market.

My father is now in the same condition. He sits sometimes all day in his wet stinking nappy. He sits in a four day old stubble, in his wet and stinking nappy, in a chair with a fabric cover, that has had someone else sitting in their own waste just before him.

the home, Newlyn Court, Merstone Close, Bilston, has been given a "good" status by the Commission for Social Care Inspection. To sit in his own piss all day long he has to pay just short of 3 grand a month. He worked very hard in his life, built up a very nice nest egg for himself and his wife, only now to have to give it up to these thieving bastards. There is no real way out, and if he got good treatment, if the rooms he occupies all day long didn't stink of piss, if he got some sort of value from his 100 pounds a day I wouldn't mind. But for his 3 grand a month he's treated worse than a dog.

I don't complain about the workers there, they get a lot of grief and are all on little above the minimum wage.

So where does all the money go ?? The the fuckin' carribean where the boss sits in his fuckin' yacht, that's where.

I'm pretty sure that as soon as the money from the worth of the house is up, he'll pop off to a better place, his house will still be my mothers home while she lives, but when she goes so will the house. Another nice bungalow freshly on the market, so the bank can cream the interest, the tax man too. As I say, I don't begrudge a care home 100 pounds a day, if the person is treated well, but not to sit in their own piss.

Newly court has 72 patients. Do the sums. They are worth too much money, to the banks and the govt. That's the bottom line.

Clean up dementia and we'll have many many more 80, 90 year olds passing already paid for property on to family members, taking it off the market. Can't have that now can we ?

[seshme]

That's terrible, can you not move him?

[Brown Sauce]

Hopefully soon ... there is a smaller one nearer, it's being arranged, I'll post here in the next week and update.

And thanks, but that's not really the point. If and when he does get moved, the standards at Newlyn Court will stay the same. They will still get their quarter of a million a month. And 72 people will still be there.

When it became too difficult for my mother to look after him, just over a year ago, this was the best place the family could find for him. The other places, and there are a lot of 'em were much worse.

look here,

http://www.csci.org.uk/registeredservicesdirectory/rsquicksearch.asp

Look around your area, and see just how many "homes" there are near to you. Loads. Lot's and lot's of creaming gits. I don't know how they sleep at night.