As I posted back in October, Terry Pratchett, one of my favorite authors, has early onset AD. Here's an update.
He was diagnosed last December with a rare form of early-onset Alzheimer's, or posterior cortical atrophy, in which areas at the back of the brain begin to shrink and shrivel. "I have a rare variant," he says."I don't understand much about it but apparently it means I'm going to be me for longer. Apparently if you're going to have Alzheimer's it's a good one to have. That's lucky, then..." The hugely successful author - incredibly he has sold around 55 million books in 33 languages and is the second most read author in the UK after JK Rowling - recently donated £500,000 to the Alzheimer's Research Trust.... He was, he says, furious with the diagnosis. "Apparently I reacted to this situation in a reasonably typical way, with a sense of loss and abandonment with an incoherent, or perhaps I should say, violently coherent fury that made the Miltonic Lucifer's rage against Heaven seem a bit miffed by comparison. It's a nasty disease, surrounded by shadows and small, largely unseen tragedies. "It seems pretty obvious to me that if you're out meeting people, breathing in lungfuls of fresh air, getting your blood coursing around your body, you're going to be a lot better prepared to deal with something like Alzheimer's than if you just stay at home watching TV and moping," he says. "You can't out-run the train but you can run and, who knows, if you can keep running for long enough, someone might find a way of blowing up the train."
Please, god, blow up the train.
"People don't know what to say, unless they have had it in the family.
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