In my life I have made a lot of decisions.
I would say the first 9 years of my life I was stubborn and made some crazy ones. I’m sure I made a lot of great ones but the crazy ones are much funnier to talk about.
I know when I was mad or didn’t get my way, I would threaten to run away and my mom finally took me up on it and packed me a knap sack. I wasn’t gone 10 minutes. That cured that.
I know in kindergarten at the Baptist Church I did not like the little boy who liked me and I was probably rude to him. I would apologize but I was 5 and have no clue what his name was or where the heck he is now, probably a millionaire on Wall Street.
I ran away from Cayce Elementary school at least once a week until I finished 3rd grade and my mom would have to come home from work and take me back. My Grandfather would hide me under the bed and say he hadn’t seen me, but she knew better.
I would play in the creek or what I thought was the creek behind our house in Cayce. My sister swears I would take my clothes off, but worse than that, it was not a creek, it was the town drainage.
I remember every bedtime story my grandfather told me and I later told them to my grandsons.
This was just the start and only the first nine years. The reason I’m telling you this crazy stuff is because I’m thankful I can remember what I did when I was 5, where I lived until I was 9 and where I live today. Alzheimer’s and dementia robs our family and friends of all that. It also robs us of that family member.
I have felt robbed for a long time but sometimes you wonder if there is something else we can do when we feel like are hands are tied. I heard this today; there was a time when someone heard they had cancer, it was a death sentence. Now we say, “what’s our next step?”
We need to get to that point where we say that when a family member is diagnosed with Alzheimers or a dementia-related disease. We must be able to ask, “what can we do?”
Find out all you can and let’s work towards finding a cure in our lifetime.
WHILE I BREATHE 