Terry Pratchett and assisted suicide

Terry Pratchett, a British fantasy author and one of my favorites, was diagnosed with Alzheimer's just days after my dad died.   He has given loads of money to research and been extremely outspoken with what is happening to him.   Now he says he wants to die in his garden, listening to his I-pod, on his own terms.
He says, "I live in hope - hope that before the disease in my brain finally wipes it clean, I can jump before I am pushed and drag my evil Nemesis to its doom, like Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty locked in combat as they go over the waterfall." 
When we put Nutter to sleep last September, I cried there at the vet's, my hand on his back, as the life went out of him.  But he was suffering and we loved him and it was the last gift we could give him.  How horrible to be denied that when it's a human you love and who is suffering.

Sir Terry says that 'right-to-die' campaigners trying to change the law on suicide are acting with 'furious sanity'. He calls for the creation of special tribunals run by coroners to establish that terminally ill patients who request assisted deaths are acting voluntarily.

Evidently they are trying to pass laws regulating assisted suicide (so it's not prosecuted as murder) and 75% of people polled agree that it's the right thing to do.
It's obvious to me, reading this long article by Sir Terry, that he still has wit and imagination plenty.

We would not walk away from a man being attacked by a monster, and if we couldn't get the ravening beast off him we might well conclude that some instant means of less painful death would be preferable before the monster ate him alive.

Screenprint of original article

177 Terry Pratchett update

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.
(screenprint)

Space Aliens now have Terry Pratchett's brain too

Yesterday, one of my favorite authors, Terry Pratchett, announced that he has early-onset Alzheimer's. (screenprint of announcement) Honestly I think I cried harder over that than I did my father's diagnosis. You know why? Because now I KNOW. With my dad, I didn't know. I knew only what I now call "Hollywood Alzheimer's" (like in The Notebook), which was a sad, gentle thing, with moments of total lucidity and memory recall. Now I know the truth--the confusion, the frustration, the fear, the violence, how it feels when your father looks at you with no recognition and says "Why are you here?"
Terry Pratchett, being a funny and upbeat sort of guy, doesn't seem overly upset at the news. In his announcement, he says, "We are taking it fairly philosophically down here and possibly with a mild optimism....Frankly, I would prefer it if people kept things cheerful, because I think there's time for at least a few more books yet :o)" He concludes with, "I would just like to draw attention to everyone reading the above that this should be interpreted as 'I am not dead'. I will, of course, be dead at some future point, as will everybody else. For me, this maybe further off than you think - it's too soon to tell."
I have read about half of his Discworld books and own about a quarter of them. They are wonderful, funny and entertaining. My hope for him, if I'm allowed to hope for him, is that as the disease progresses, he thinks he lives there in Ankh-Morpork and forgets this world, rather than vice versa.
What a terrible fate to befall someone who has delighted so many people.