Still Alice

by Lisa Genova

But I didn’t know how to feel WITH her. This is the distinction between sympathy and empathy. Sympathy is feeling for someone and keeps us emotionally detached, our experiences separate. Empathy is feeling with someone.

Attention, rehearsal, elaboration, or emotional significance was needed if perceived information was to be pushed beyond the recent memory space into longer-term storage, else it would be quickly and naturally discarded with the passage of time.

There’s no dementia protein in your blood that can tell us you have it, and we wouldn’t expect to see any brain atrophy on an MRI until much later stages in the disease.”

anything that’s good for the heart is going to be good for the brain,

And when the burden of her disease exceeded the pleasure of that ice cream, she wanted to die.

“It’s taking me well over an hour to get to sleep, and then I usually wake up a couple of hours after that and go through the whole thing all over again.”

“I know all this anxiety keeps me up, but I can’t seem to help it. As soon as I can’t fall asleep, I worry, and then I can’t sleep because I’m worried. It’s exhausting just telling you about it.”

I hate talking on the phone now. If I can’t see the person I’m talking to, I have a really hard time understanding the entire conversation. I usually lose track of what the person is saying while I’m chasing down words in my head.”

This made her uneasy and painfully aware that she was declining, her past becoming unhinged from her present.

Auditory and visual hallucinations were realities for about half of people with Alzheimer’s disease,

They talked about her as if she weren’t sitting in the wing chair, a few feet away. They talked about her, in front of her, as if she were deaf. They talked about her, in front of her, without including her, as if she had Alzheimer’s disease.

“I think that even if you don’t know who I am someday, you’ll still know that I love you.” “What if I see you, and I don’t know that you’re my daughter, and I don’t know that you love me?” “Then, I’ll tell you that I do, and you’ll believe me.”

The mother in her believed that the love she had for her daughter was safe from the mayhem in her mind, because it lived in her heart.

Her illness probably started long before she was diagnosed last January. She and you and your family and her colleagues probably disregarded any number of symptoms as fluke, or normal, or chalked them up to stress, not enough sleep, too much to drink, and on and on. This could’ve gone on easily for a year or two or longer.

Unfortunately, this is a progressive, degenerative disease with no cure. It gets worse, despite any medication we have right now.”