To know or not to know, that is the question
By chance earlier this week, whilst flitting around the newspaper websites, I came across a piece published in the Daily Mail that about a five-minute diagnostic test developed by a Cambridge University spin-off company Cognetivity Neurosciences – designed to predict someone’s chances of developing Alzheimer’s and/or dementia within the next fifteen years – that is about to begin undergoing NHS trials.
See here for a link to said article – DAILY MAIL
Tapping this post out as someone who is about to enter his eighth decade and can scarcely believe it – subscribing as I do the instinctive, illogical but (I should have thought) perfectly human attitude that ageing is something that happens exclusively to other people – several thoughts on this and related matters have occurred to me since.
We all live our lives in different ways.
In early middle-age I used to admire my contemporaries who, apparently devoid of any concession to the passing years, carried on in full-tilt mode, seemingly having adopted one or more of the attitudes “You only live once”, “You’re only as young as you feel” and/or “Live in the moment”.
Some of them are still doing it. Some are dead. And most, in one guise or another, have “grown up” and become more relaxed/sanguine and generally laid back as they travel along the metaphorical ever-moving walkway from youth to old age.
From a personal point of view, I can recall at some point in my early fifties beginning to “register” instances where I would forget where I’d left objects I regularly used in everyday existence; or becoming annoyingly clumsy, as in e.g. in advertently knocking over a salt-shaker when conveying a jar of coffee from a kitchen cupboard towards my chosen mug; or even finding it increasingly difficult to maintain my balance when standing on one leg whilst pulling on my underpants.
Over the course of time I came to regard these – and other episodes like them – simply as part of life’s rich tapestry and things to be accommodated or allowed for, rather than (as it were) fought against, simply because “fighting” in this context was always going to be more a case of potentially winning a minor battle than the inevitable war.
One issue I find myself contemplating last night was whether – assuming the above-mentioned NHS trials are successful and this “Five Minute Alzheimer’s/dementia test” is offered to the public – I would welcome the opportunity to take one myself.
I suspect I probably would.
Arguably – in a general sense – if one ever develops physical or mental symptoms of any sort, it’s better to nip along, see the quack and get them checked out: they could be signals of “nothing at all” (in which case that’s great) or, at the other end of the spectrum, they could be early indications of a serious problem (in which case, generally speaking, it’s better to know what you’re facing, rather than the opposite).
Given the number of times these days I forget people’s names, cannot remember which day of the week it is and/or keep mislaying things I had made special vows not to lose, I sometimes find myself putting these aberrations down in public to my encroaching dementia, simply in order to charm/disarm those familiar to me who delight in teasing me that I’m going ga-ga!
