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Indlæser... Slow Dancing with a Stranger: Lost and Found in the Age of Alzheimer'saf Meryl Comer
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Biography & Autobiography.
Health & Fitness.
Medical.
Nonfiction.
HTML: A New York Times Bestseller Emmy-award winning broadcast journalist and leading Alzheimer's advocate Meryl Comer's Slow Dancing With a Stranger is a profoundly personal, unflinching account of her husband's battle with Alzheimer's disease that serves as a much-needed wake-up call to better understand and address a progressive and deadly affliction. When Meryl Comer's husband Harvey Gralnick was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's disease in 1996, she watched as the man who headed hematology and oncology research at the National Institutes of Health started to misplace important documents and forget clinical details that had once been cataloged encyclopedically in his mind. With harrowing honesty, she brings readers face to face with this devastating condition and its effects on its victims and those who care for them. Detailing the daily realities and overwhelming responsibilities of caregiving, Comer sheds intensive light on this national health crisis, using her personal experiences??the mistakes and the breakthroughs??to put a face to a misunderstood disease, while revealing the facts everyone needs to know. Pragmatic and relentless, Meryl has dedicated herself to fighting Alzheimer's and raising public awareness. "Nothing I do is really about me; it's all about making sure no one ends up like me," she writes. Deeply personal and illuminating, Slow Dancing With a Stranger offers insight and guidance for navigating Alzheimer's challenges. It is also an urgent call to action for intensive research and a warning that we must prepare for the future, instead of being controlled by a disease and a healthcare system unable to fight it No library descriptions found. |
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Meryl’s book dedication is to her grandchildren, that may their memories last a lifetime. Memories are what we take for granted. When we forget something small and inconsequential, like where we placed our keys, it’s nothing. Imagine forgetting everything, even who you are. I was riveted as Slow Dancing with a Stranger detailed how Harvey disintegrated from a true Renaissance man—cultured, elegant, educated, gracious, charming and creative—into a shambling shell who might lash out in rage at any minute against his wife and caregivers. As I read, I could hardly believe the horror of what Alzheimer’s can do, and there is no cure. The statistics on Alzheimer’s are frightening. Every sixty-eight seconds, someone falls victim, but fifty percent are never diagnosed. The disease affects 5.4 million people in the US and 44 million worldwide.
What is clear from reading this harrowing memoir is that the average person has no concept of what it is like to live with and care for someone with Alzheimer’s. Forget the sepia tinged idea of a sufferer just having more than a few ‘senior moments.’ There is no glamour and very little reward in caring for an Alzheimer’s sufferer. Meryl’s brutally honest account describes a descent into a kind of nightmarish madness, hideous for both the caregiver and the sufferer. Fighting a dread disease is made easier when the patient can fight back, too, along with their family, loved ones and medical team. Imagine when the silent enemy is insidiously eating away at all that one cherishes: one’s memories, one’s capacity for human behaviour, one’s sense of self.
Closeness, or intimacy, and shared memories define relationships. When you have no memories, you have no ‘you.’ The loss of social restraints, the loss of memory and identity, the loss of connection with people they once loved and who love them is painfully and agonisingly described in Meryl’s words. Writing with elegance and simplicity, the author cogently describes a hellish journey that most of us would have given up on, a labour of love beyond what any average person would take on. The author asks and answers many soul searching questions in her book, the most important one being why take on this burden? Was it out of love, duty, or guilt? Perhaps Meryl answers that best with these words: “No one deserves to be forgotten in life because their disease is without hope.” This book is a must-read, no matter your age. ( )