I ended last week’s column by saying:”... next week we’ll get back to our ‘Boomer Primer’ thing – HEY: If aging were easy, everybody would do it!”
And, of course, everybody does, and from Day 1: You’re older today than you were yesterday, and you’ll be older by lunch time than you were at breakfast, blah blah – Obvious, right? Sure. And in a lot of day-to-day ways, it doesn’t really matter, until all those day-to-day days add up to months and years and years and years and suddenly, BOOM! It MATTERS!
And when it starts to matter, it often starts to matter a LOT, because that little voice that we usually bury under the day-to-dayness begins to get through, and begins to point out that all those day-to-day days won’t go on forever, which means that we could actually measure (in a very general sort of way) the distance between “here” and “there,” and we all know where “there” is.
The whole idea of this “Boomer Primer” thing (try saying that six times, fast!) is to get us all to think about things we need to think about if we’ve figured out that our days won’t go on forever – If we’re on the threshold, as it were – And there are two subjects that I know of that will turn a room full of energetic, opinionated Boomers into a collection of deer-in-the-headlights zombies, one being Medicare.
Medicare will usually induce group coma because of what’s perceived as its sheer complexity: This “part” and that “part” which connects to this over here IF you’ve selected one of 87 plans of that part depending upon your income and whether you’re working and where you live and if your doctor does or doesn’t and…And, then, of course, there’s the daunting aspect of attempting to decipher “explanations of benefits” that were never meant to be deciphered, and…
Oh, sure, there are always a few in the room who helped Mom or Dad with their Medicare stuff, and so have concluded that they understand the “elephant,” usually only to discover that what they understand is Mom’s or Dad’s side of the elephant, but DON’T PANIC! – Because, Medicare is not what I’m here to talk about (today!); no, today I want to talk about the OTHER subject that will generally lobotomize a room of full of booming Boomers: Alzheimer’s disease.
There are very few two-word phrases that I know of that will induce that level of fear: “Alzheimer’s disease.” It terrifies us because most of us have seen it, one way or the other, to one degree or another, in place or another. We know that there’s no cure, no hope and no way back, and we know that as the “me” fades away, we are likely to take people that we have purported to love, with us – And most of us, if the truth be known, would trade away a fair number of our remaining days to avoid that.
Toward the end of last year, in what may have been the last genuinely bipartisan effort of Congress (Nothing unites grossly disparate factions quicker than FEAR!), in our collective memory AND at right about the time I suggested it (he said, humbly), the National Alzheimer’s Plan Act got passed. That was a good idea because (a) there are 5.4 million folks living with Alzheimer’s in the U.S. right now, and that could rocket to 16 million by 2050, which is only 39 years away, AND (b) it’s the 6th leading cause of death, and the only one in the “top ten” causes without a way to prevent, cure or even slow it’s progression! Convinced? Me, too.
So now the question becomes, what do we need that National Alzheimer’s Plan Act to actually do; after all, if you were inventing Medicare, would it look the way it currently looks? Probably not, so the Alzheimer’s Association’s Western and Central Washington State Chapter is putting on a series of public input sessions to hear from you – Us! – About what this Plan should include, which actually borders on uncommon common sense.
Nobody – I repeat, NOBODY – Knows as much about the day-to-day realities of this disease as do the people who are living with it, or have. And it doesn’t really matter if it is or was “Alzheimer’s” or any form of dementia or memory loss – If you’ve walked the walk, you know.
So we’re hoping that you’ll join us at the Sequim Senior Activity Center (921 E. Hammond Street in Sequim, if you didn’t know) tomorrow (August 26th) from 1:00 to 3:00 to be a part of what we hope will be, someday, the “solution.” I’m told that I’m going to “moderate” this gathering, and I have absolutely no idea what that means, but I don’t care, because it isn’t about me – It’s about you, and what you know and what you’ve learned and what you need and what you worry about and what would actually help.
The Chapter will collect input from around the state and present it to the Department of Health and Human Services, the Federal agency responsible for actually creating said Plan. No way you can get to the Sequim Senior Activity Center tomorrow anywhere between 1:00 and 3:00? OK, I’m not going to pretend I don’t get it; then, go to www.alz.org/napa and see what you see, but the best thing would be to see you, tomorrow, and here’s why:
This is about thousands and millions of people’s lives, so we need the smartest folks around. We need you.
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