Our Memory
I saw a documentary last night on my on demand TV called Wonderland: The Alzheimer’s Choir, is was a 40 min program about a choir made of Alzheimer’s sufferers and their partner’s. The program interviewed the partner of the Alzheimer sufferer and followed part of there home or residential care home life and how strangely music is one thing that all Alzheimer’s sufferers no matter how far along their disease has progressed seem to remember and remember word for word in most cases. This documentary is very moving and has made me understand Alzheimer’s a bit better, I have for a long time thought that people with Alzheimer’s revert back to a childlike state but I was so wrong and I want to learn more. If you have the time please watch the documentary for yourself.
\”Wonderland: Alzheimers Choir\”
No one truly knows how our brains store and recall memories, why a smell can make us remember something we did years ago or a song we hear can trigger good times. We can remember good times and unfortunately bad times too but we can also forget things and lose our memories for certain reasons and so memory is precious thing. Especially for people afflicted with Alzheimer’s Disease.
In Britain three are around 500,000 people with Alzheimer’s Disease (35 Million worldwide) and daily life is a constant battle with their memory. The disease was discovered 1901 after the man it was named after (Dr Alois Alzheimer) wrote a paper on an elderly patient displaying short term memory loss. The disease was recognized Alzheimer’s 1906 after Dr Alzheimer gave a speech about his findings.
Alzheimer’s Disease is the most common form Dementia and is a progressive, degenerative and terminal disease. It starts with memory loss, in some cases depression and an impairment of the ability to do complex tasks and retain newly learned information and is called pre-dementia. The second stage is called early dementia and can affect language, the persons perception and and their movement, these symptoms become more noticeable than the person’s memory loss and it is their short term memory that is affected rather than their long term memory. Stage three is called moderate dementia and starts to affect the persons independence where everyday tasks become difficult to do, their speech becomes impaired as are writing and reading. Long term memory also starts to be lost and the person finds it difficult to remember who people are, they also become prone to falls, irritability, wandering, emotional (laughing and crying) outbursts, unrinary incontinence, and seeing things that aren’t there. At this stage carers find it difficult to cope especially if they themselves are elderly and the Alzheimer’s sufferer is moved to a care home. In the final stage, advanced dementia the sufferer depends entirely on their caregiver. Their speech is almost or completely lost become exhausted are bedridden and are no longer able to feed themselves. As Alzheimer’s is a terminal disease with loss of braincells and the body slowly shutting down it is not because of the disease that the person usually dies but an infection or pneumonia.
Alzheimer’s is a terrible debilitating disease which is incurable and is terrifying to people the older they get, members of my family have spoken words like “if I ever get Alzheimer’s just shoot me” which is horrible to hear from someone you love, but the hope is that with the advancement of science we may one day find a cure.
