Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion 20140920

Her book, slow dancing with a stranger. Before i start my full introduction, meryl comer has asked me to play a short video and im going to turn that on just as an introduction to the talk. Before i do that, if you dont mind turning off your cell phones, that will just help us stay focused on the topic at hand with less disruption during the talk. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible] [inaudible] [inaudible] it is time for a generation to say unacceptable. This is not the way for us to analyze okay. As i said, i am in german i am one of the managers here at politics and prose and i welcome all of you today. As you know, we have many events youre at the store and then we had things going on nearly everyday, sometimes multiple times a day. If you are not all connected through our email list or checking our calendar online, or if you would like to be in our emails, is stay involved and we consider ourselves much more than just a bookstore. We are a Community Space that welcomes conversation and we have classes and both groups and author talks such as this one. So welcome and thank you for coming. [applause] meryl comer is an Emmy Awardwinning veteran reporter and talk show host and she was among the first tv news women in the 1980s to specialize in Business News as it relates to Public Policy with a nationally syndicated debate show, it is your business. She also coanchored nations as this today on espn. She is now the ceo of the Geoffrey Beene foundation alzheimers initiative, which is prominently providing 100 of the net profit of the Geoffrey Beene income dedicated to the foundation along with work of cancer and Wounded Warriors and protection of women and children. She has provided testimony and served two times on the alzheimers board of association or she is a Founding Member of u. S. Against alzheimers and a cofounder of the women against alzheimers network. Alzheimers disease affects 36 Million People worldwide and her husband was the chief of hematology and oncology at the National Institute of health when he was diagnosed with early onset alzheimers at age 58. She decided to leave her television her to become a caregiver both for her husband and for her mother who had alzheimers in home hospice. Since the 1996 diagnosis, she has become an outspoken advocate on this illness and for the rights that caregivers and patients alike should have. In her book, slow dancing with a stranger, lost in the age of alzheimers, she dedicates her struggle and as a caregiver and dealing with longterm care facilities. And so to enhance the public conversation, she has come to share her book with us today and we thank you very much and we welcome meryl comer. [applause] my thanks to you all coming out on this glorious day, this last day of summer. I am so touched. This issue is so important, i think, to all of us. I would like to do a survey because i am much more interested in the audience than might help. So i would like to ask you how many have a Family Member or relative with this disease in the audience . And how many have a friend or colleague whose loved one has been affected . A Family Member or friend in a caregiver role. Are you concerned about a loved one or yourself . Raise your hand. And are there any doctors or lawyers or psychiatrist and politicians in the audience . Oh, good. We have a good conversation. This is a very special audience to me. Because you are engaged around the body of politics in this town and with the cspan audience. To me, this is one of the most important stops that i will ever make on this book to her. This morning i googled to see how many books have been written on alzheimers. There are over 11,000 books, which prompted me to think, do we really need another book on alzheimers and i thought id better tell you what this book is and what it is and and first of all, i applaud those familieo speak how they have learned to live within the disease and if you will recall, this disease has been around for a very long time and many of the nonprofits that grew up in that state had to help people live in the moment and when there is a disease with no cure, you have to be able to live in that space with a loved one and it stretches out over the years. The span of a disease like this can last from three to 20 years. And i am right on the tip of 20 years. Told that my husband would not last long because he was an early onset victim and we can get into that issue later. But most of the book that i have read cannot keep up with the idiosyncratic twists in terms of how each of us is. We are different personalities and it is very hard to write the book that will tell you how to manage a loved one through this process. But i couldnt write a book that accepts the accept the status quo and i have great admiration for those who help others live in this. Because this is a disease that will ravish our generation as baby boomers and create an untenable border and on our children and i find that unacceptable. When you put yourself out there as an author, you really put yourself out there as an author. I also believe, and the reason i was willing to write it, it is a shout out to all caregivers because caregivers are the keeper of the secrets and we know the details. But most people dont want our details. So we are very quiet and we believe that it is our responsibility to protect loved ones dignity. And we do that very well. We do that by hiding loved ones away so you never see what the disease really looks like. It is very painful to see a smart individual producer and totally dependent upon you were someone who cant remember who you are and i think that that is one of the most dramatic things that happen. And because this is such an important audience, i thought that i would like to share with you some of the latest statistics. You and everyone you know will eventually be touched by this disease but living with it doesnt need to be so cruel. 50 of people will develop some form of dementia by the time they are 85 years of age and remember that 85 years old is the fastest demographic growing in the country and also, by the way, predominantly women. So this is a huge issue. And i will not go beyond 20 or 30 because politicians cant get beyond one year. We will have 76 Million People suffering from this disease. And the impact is growing. 44 million victims worldwide, 10 million baby boomers and 1 trillion in annual costs to care for loved ones with this disease. And this is what we view as the crisis of our generation of children. We spend a great deal of money annually on this disease and if you look at the bottom, the little red line, less than 1 on research. So we spent about 9 billion on hiv and aids, cancer is around 5 billion a year and less than 1 when we had 76 million baby boomers turning 65 at the rate of 10,000 per day, 4000 4 million a year for the next 20 years. The youngest baby boomers turn 50. Is anyone here younger than 50 . Because i would like to talk your generation as well. And this just came out from a Merrill Lynch study done in conjunction with age. More people now cited as a Serious Health condition of later life than cancer, stroke, heart disease, diabetes, and arthritis combined. And the most worrisome disease, if you are 55 or over, it is definitely alzheimers. Fortyfive to 64, 18 to 44 is cancer as well. This is the most worrisome disease later in life. But what is most striking is that its not just baby boomers that are worried. It is our children. And our children are watching us take care of our parents, looking at the wear and tear and what it is causing with their dreams and dreams that might be put on hold and saying, is that our future . This is one of the first times that we are beginning to understand how infectious, although this is not a disease, how infectious it is to the family. For those of us that have spent a lot of time in this town, if you go back 20 years, the debate with Social Security was going to create the intergenerational rivalry and this time it is going to be alzheimers. And this tells you how it affects the brain. Im sorry . Okay. Its too good not to do. Okay, we just lost the video here. Sorry about that. Here it goes. And we are looking for sound. It comes on gradually as to abnormal protein kill brain cells. And they start here in the hippocampus, a part of the brain where memories are first formed. And over many years time, the plaques and tangles slowly destroy the hippocampus and it becomes harder and harder to warm new memories. Recollections from a few hours or days ago that the rest of us might take for granted are just not there. After that, more plaques and tangles spread into different regions of the brain, killing cells and compromising functions wherever they go. This spreading around is what causes the different stages of alzheimers. From the hippocampus, the disease spreads here to the region of the brain brain where language is processed. When that happens, it gets tougher to find the right words. Then the disease creeps towards the front of the brain where logical thought takes place and very gradually a person begins to lose the ability to solve problems and grasp concepts and make plans. Next, the plaques and tangles and be the part of the brain where emotions are regulated. When this happens, the patient gradually loses control over moods and feelings. After that the disease moves to the brain where it makes sense to you that it sees and hears and smells. In this stage, alzheimers wreaks havoc on a persons senses that can smart and transfer hallucinations. Eventually the plaques and tangles erased the persons most gold and precious memories which are stored in the back of the brain. Near the end, the disease compromises a persons balance and coordination and in the very last stage, it destroys the part of the brain that regulates breathing. As well as the heart. The progression from mild forgetting to death is slow and steady and it takes place over an average. We may need another power source. [inaudible conversations] that is what being alive is all about. The bottom line is that what happens is that this is not a normal part of aging and it is a neurodegenerative disease that is always fatal. Twenty years ago when my husband got the disease, there were no disease modifying drugs whatsoever except one or two to deal with symptoms. Today, there are no disease modifying drugs except the four of them that were available at that time. When my mother became ill with the disease as well, it became quite obvious to me that this was what was going wrong to why would people not be responsive and understand and be offended by this disease . What i realized is that people never saw the disease because we hit our loved ones away and i need to tell you that the caregivers are the keepers of the secret and the only reason i wrote this book was to unlock a conversation that has been hidden away. And so for those of you who may not been able to be in the back, how many of you are worried about being a burden on your family . And losing dignity, being more isolated from friends and family. As well as not being able to do things that you enjoy. As well as Health Care Costs and related expenses, being in pain or discomfort. Dying and death and quite frankly, after spending 20 years, my husband and those who define yourself by your intellect and who you are, this is not a disease that you want to live with or impose upon family. The idea that you can control what happens to you with this disease, forget it. My mother, this disease slips over you as you saw the video and it flips over you in a way so that you are in and out of reality. I have my husbands copilot and his guardian and my husband has a known who i am for the last 12 years. But he knows my touch. And i have to be persuaded that he knows my touch because i lead the team and i do a 12 hour shift not every day for my husband bought for my mother as well. And somewhere deep you have to believe that you can reach a loved one in this space. A Washington Post reporter said that i said i lost my prime. Well, i said it just about that way. And he said that there seemed to be a bitter overtones that you cannot take careful of one for 20 years and be bitter, it would eat you alive. You have to find a place where you can help a loved one in this state. Research over these past several years have gotten better, but it has not filtered down to all of us. Art therapy in music therapy, its all wonderful, but it only works in a very small period of time and then you have to let it go. If you fight this disease, you will be destroyed along with the victim. What i mean by that is we all the pallets of care. We played whatever strength they have and when they cant do it anymore, you have to let it go. And i beg you to let it go because it is too frustrating on your. If you werent persuaded this is an important issue, 50 greater risk for this disease im sorry, we are having some problems with the slide. If youre overweight or have a metaphorical disorder, depression, diabetes, any type of addiction. You are 50 more likely to get this disease. Does sex matter . This is a challenge that we ran globally and we asked that question. Do you remember cardiovascular disease . Everyone assumed it was a mans disease and it turned out to be the biggest killer of women. We felt that it was important to ask that same question. Differences matter and thats one of the reasons that we ask that research question. And now that is becoming a bigger and bigger issue issue. Think about what they are learning in differences of how women respond to pharmacological substances versus men. We must tease these differences out. We have deliberately created, up against alzheimers, an entire network that respects other ethnicities and we have africanamericans against alzheimers number we have latinos against alzheimers. We have clergy and researchers as well. We need to come together as networks and raise our voices that this disease is unacceptable for our future. And the reason it is such a vague womens issue, we outlive men statistically and we are more prone to get it, but science doesnt know why. But they do know that women progress into the disease faster than men. Into fullblown alzheimers. If its on the maternal side, you are at higher risk for getting the disease. And two thirds of the caregivers in this country are women. It is unpaid care. 70 of families predicate care of loved ones at home. And sometimes there are situations that make it impossible to take care of someone at home. The caregiver gets it, Young Children are endangered by the behaviors, that is what creates institutionalization in this country. In our case, my husband was a physician as was mentioned, it a chief of hematology and he was in denial all the way into the disease. Which made it even more difficult. He was a Long Distance runner, a transix with two and a half, very disciplined, oak four languages, 200 published papers and guess what . It didnt matter. And i think that that is the most important point. In a generation we are into the lose it or use it mentality or 60 is the new 40. I would love that because i would try it every day. But we are in serious denial. And i think that that is what inhibits us for having the conversation that we need about this disease. This is the disease of our generation. 76 million of us and we are transformational and we want to do something. So why are we in arms about this disease . That will destroy our families and our lives and burden the next generation. Being in denial made it it difficult to take care of my husband. And people hideout for a long time and i could bathe in shave and dress and take my husband to a reception in washington and everybody was so involved in this town. Nobody noticed. If you kept moving, nobody noticed. My antennae are up every time i go to a reception. The woman who goes to this day and doesnt know what to pick up, or the husband who says, would you mind going and checking on my wife, shes been away too long. Or spouse is filling in for each other in their conversations when they just returned from a wonderful trip and one of them doesnt remember where they were. The creeping of the disease is everywhere. Everywhere. But we are buying into the denial and we do not want to see what we are about to live with. And we play into that denial. Lets go back 20 years. Twenty years ago the diagnostics were not as good as they are today. Today you could take a test that would tell you whether or not you have a high risk for the disease. How many of you would like to know . I need to know because i have seen what the disease does to families. I need to know because its always too soon before its too late. The endoflife conversation that is so hard around the Kitchen Table at dinner, do you know whether you put your life in order so that your family doesnt have to guess about your endoflife wishes . I will tell you that ellen goodman, the columnist from off and has had the conversation project and i direct you there because you can actually download all the forms that you will need to have that conversation. And my husband was no road map, although i do know that my husband would not have considered this living by any stretch of the imagination. And there are some people who are here to do my husband professionally and they are shaking their heads. This is a very cruel disease. The doctors just want to diagnose. Trying to get a doctor to a doctor, lots of luck. Im a doctors wife so i type up my observations. They disappear and come back and i am brushed aside. I detail the journey and i was ignored. Totally ignored. And once ignored, then i became his victim. I was denying my husband access to things that hes wanted. Try to take a porsche away from a nifty sixyearold man. We all wait too long to try to give a loved one their independence. My rule of fun is anticipated and anticipate. I went in one night old the plug on his car and i dont understand foreign cars, but i pulled whatever was there and lock the garage or in for five years my husband said where is the car and i said oh, you had to get one of those foreign cars and its in the shop. And every day he asked about his car. But my peace of mind was his independence ended when he might endanger another human being. I could not live with the idea that i had not been proactive and i would encourage anyone with a loved one that we want to give them their ability to be independent for as long as they can, but always remember the people around them and who they might endanger. When someone wanders away and that happens because the to many people that are very widely in their space, my heart tells me that the family waited too long. And they have lived into the denial. And so a little old lady went without her keys. I dont remember my daughters wedding, she might say. No shots below the waist defy and bathing him. This is the story. I call myself a prisoner of alzheimer is, i am an extension of his disease. I need some help to speak out for both victims because they have no voice and for caregivers. This is how meryl comer begins each day. Crouching in the dim Morning Light to empty her husbands urine bag. That accomplished, she removed his catheter and helps him out of bed. I will swing your legs around. In a moment she will get one of the occasional fleeting acknowledgements that he knows she is there. He is probably not aware she is his wife for likely doesnt know you are present. Good morning. Harvey, her 70yearold husband is in his twelfth year of alzheimers disease, one of the last normal phases when most Human Interaction ceases and patients completely withdraw. As devoted as she is to caring for him, meryl comer is now in her twelfth year of Something Like hell. Her story echoes that of millions of families across the country coping with the ravages of this mostly untreatable and so far incurable disease. The opportunity it doesnt care what color you are, doesnt care how much education you have, doesnt care how much money you have, it can destroy you. They may have exhausted their financial referrals in addition to their emotional responses there is always a second patient with alzheimers disease, the care giver requires attention as well. The second in this place, meryl comer was a long way from that when her husband first fell ill. I am meryl comer, special assignment in tokyo. The net tv newswoman she spent her days interviewing business leaders, washington political figures and even president s. Divorce from her first husband and with the young son meryl comer mary in 1980. He was then at the peak of a prestigious career as a physician and scientist specializing in blood related cancers at the National Institutes of health. In the mid 1990s he was diagnosed with early onset alzheimers and the eventually had to leave and i age. It has nothing to do with the mind. Theyre too many successes. Meryl comer quit her job and became his full time caregiver. As often happens with alzheimers patients he became paranoid, delusional and occasionally even violent. It was a confrontation. Personal care take it as if they are attacking them. Alzheimers is not gradual dementia everyone thinks it is. It does in another direction. It is physically frightening and terrifying. The sad thing is you dont have a good memory. You dont have a good memory. I wrote this book but it is really not about me. It is my story, but i wrote it because there are 15 million caregivers just like me. Think of the families with young men and women who come back from war with posttraumatic stress, longterm chronic diseases. I wrote what they are afraid to say out loud and i was willing to do it only to try to unlock the conversation because the care givers are the keepers of the secret. I believe whether it is bossism, and trust me i see pain everywhere. I dont feel comparative pain or my pain is bigger than your pain, i just see pain and it breaks my heart. I see young families with children with disabilities, young men and women, if that is the point for a conversation we send them to work, we owe them a future and with increased dementia we are on a trajectory for alzheimers and just understand alzheimers is just the most popular form of dementia. There is vascular dementia from strokes, there are many areas. It is all horrible. It is all horrible. I would like to begin a dialogue. A gentleman over there in the sheriff, if you come to the mic, i offered to read something that caught your attention. You can use the mike right there, over there. Let us know who you are. I read the book before it was published. I am a psychiatrist in washington. I have known many people with alzheimers disease. I want to read two pages. Refers to what meryl comer showed us of the interview and the story of the life of harvey on the pbs show because it goes to the question meryl comer faces a u. S. Yourself a as you read the book, why . Why the role of the caregiver . There are two pages because it came at the end of the book where people came up to her after seeing that show and was facing her, these are really very insightful and in thinking about her work in this book and the relationship, to the very end, a welldressed man in his mid 50s caught up to me walking down the street to say your story was hard to watch. Too that your husband doesnt know how lucky he is. I dont think my wife would be as good to me. I am afraid to ask and find out. Then he turned and crossed the street before i could respond to. Asleep expert recognized me and offered that lack of sleep over time increases risk of dementia. Be careful not to become the other victim of this disease, he warned. I smiled, then closed my eyes. I had been up all night. At a dinner meeting of scientists to whom i had just been introduced pulled me aside to ask please forgive my blunt question. I you doing what you do for your husband out of love or are you just trying to do the right thing . I must have appeared perplexed because he quickly added i struggle with this question myself which is why i asked. My wife was diagnosed three years ago. The woman i love was becoming less and less the woman i fell in love with and married. I fell in love with a person, not a body. I ask you because you had almost three times longer to think about it. I also ask you because i believe you will tell me what is real, not what is correct. He deserved an answer but then was not the time. I offer him my Business Card with a hug and a whisper. Professional women, most of whom i didnt know, contacted me out of the blue through email. They both admired me and admonish the for sacrificing my career, a few shared the total alzheimers taken on their own marriages, one woman email me that she thought i was brave going public. She added she would draw the line and caring for her husband when he became incontinence or wandered away. Most said they did not plan to take care of their spouses at home. I was mulling over the very reactions when one day a woman i knew professionally called me and said she urgently needed to meet. Over breakfast at a neighborhood bakery she confessed that she was struggling to get her husband and her self through the early stages of his alzheimers diagnosis. Knowing that her handsome husband, a washington insider, was in the air early stages of the disease, for now at least she preferred to keep it that way. I listened while she talked, her close on untouched on the state and she stopped for a moment, her voice catching and said i saw you on the news. I wanted to hear what she would say next. A few moments passed in silence. I cant do it, she confessed. I dont want to be like you. Before she could say any more i stopped her. Amid all my uncertainty about how to move forward, my constant debate over the right words to use, i finally knew what i wanted to say and i told her. I dont want anyone to have to be like me. That opens up a wide range of conversation. What would you do for your spouse . Would they do it for you . Friends ask me that all the time. What was most interesting to me after this i only realized after i wrote the book, i was so intent on them being offended by what happened to harvey when i realized after i read the book they were watching me. They were running the numbers 24 7 and what the toll was taking on the. What disturbs me is that i was one of the first generation of women into the work force. I had no options. No one wanted my husband. I was told he was too dangerous to bring home. No facility would take my husband, not even 100,000 private pay and it is all private pay by the way. No one understands the cost of care around this disease but when i wrote the book realized they were watching me. 20 years later, the average caregiver today is 48 years old. In the military it is 28. Women today are being forced to do exactly what i did, leaving their careers and having to go and take care of their parents or a loved one because either the care is inadequate, they cant afford it, they have to try it first at home. This is a huge problem and i will give you one more that i hope offends everyone in this room. Caregivers are getting sick because of the intensity of care over years and now we are six times more likely todementia because of the care. We are suffering our own form of posttraumatic stress. How many are willing to raise their hands and say that is unacceptable . What are we doing for our loved ones . The first personal conversation of what you are willing to do and what limits you are, is a very personal conversation. My husband was restrained in the hospital. When you see a loved one restrained, i knew that in any facility would be restrained andovers of the medicated. I could not live with myself as a human being knowing someone i loved would be restrained and the only way i could do it was to do it myself and manage the care. The doctors dont like to diagnose because they cant street and there i feel they do a great disservice to all of us. Less pesticide what we can manage. Cardiologists who dont like to tell their patients because they dont want to depress them, give people an opportunity to put their lives in order, tell people they love them, drop out of work, quit their jobs, live a life, because this disease is relentless. There is no way back. The idea that with all little more exercise, i am sure we went to exercise today because we know that is the only thing, there is no empirical evidence that this will save us from the disease or the mediterranean diet or more sex. Go for it but it wont save you from this unrelenting disease. I should use the numbers. Less than 1 spent on research, 500 million of an epidemic heading our way globally. We are one of the last countries by the way really paying attention to what is going on. A huge issue in china, japan, all for western europe. People are trying to create dementia friendly societies. Who was on the front lines as a First Responder when something goes out . The care giver. We make an assumption in this country that care givers are well. We are getting sick taking care of our loved ones. They are paying lip service to us and making assumptions. That should make some of you upset. I wrote this because i dont want anyone to live the life i have lived. I made my choice is then and i have been forced to defend them, believe it or not. I have had reporters secondguess why i would do this. But if you have seen this disease up close, there was nothing left for me to do. The other thing with early onset and because smart people hide out, the hippocampus as you saw goes into overdrive so they fight so hard to stay in control even if they are losing control, some of the behaviors are very bizarre. The struggles that you have, the dropoff is very precipitous because they fought so hard and so long so you see not the slow progression but you see something more precipitous. Doctors say that those with early onset dont last very long. I am into my 20th year. The doctors dont know and they owe us to tell us. When they said to me oh harvey cant last a long time, a couple more years maybe, what was my reaction . What do we do . We were brought up to be stoic. I will tough it out. I got through the hard part, we can do that. We were trained to internalize the pain, swallow it and live in it. I am saying how you manage pain is very important because you can get sucked in. The things that saved me is i became an advocate. I used to be appropriate. It is so boring, trust me. It took me getting older but now i am fearless. I do not want my son and his family, my antidepressants of choice, doing for me what i have done for my husband and my mother with love. Acceptable for me. I do not want to be remembered that way. Happy to talk with any of you. If you have any questions we have a little bit of time remaining. I will answer any thing in the book. I dont think my son has read the book. That will be a very interesting conversation. My advice to all mothers, get it out there and let them know. Any questions for me that you have . Do you want to go to the mic . Faith and i work out together. Working out has been survival training, physicality of lifting a loved ones, has frozen my shoulders. I am a psychologist, i know marilyn, taking my call us by the content. And i know a bit of what it is about. What i am struck with among other things is how can we change what is being done in research, the Research Questions and the amount of research. Looking at the aids model, aids had in a way of speaking the advantage of affecting young people, and they are very clever and outrageous, and research tremendously and the secretiveness and old people, the only thing it seems to me speaking politically, the number of people, 76 million is daunting. Searching to find a country that has 6 million. This is like germany. What would be your suggestion how to change that 1 . We need 2 billion annually. 20 acrosstheboard. That is really an acceptable. The research is at a tipping point. There are many exciting things happening in this space, but we have to stand up together and really say that this is unacceptable. We have to fight for more funding, we have to get in the face of our congresspeople. We would be better off if this was a brand new disease and all the sudden attack baby boomers that hadnt been hanging around to collect the stigma that it has and the ageism, there are a lot of things going on, ageism and stigma. The stigma is very deep, right beneath the surface because of the behaviors around this disease. And you have to step up. You demand money for research, and we need to wage a war on alzheimers the way the waged the war on cancer. We learned to live with cancer, hiv aids. There are no cures, we learned to live with disease. I recall the Breast Cancer movement. A woman who worked for me had Breast Cancer, she came back, got sick again. Her head was shaved, she could not move, need post its on every piece of furniture in the house and where they would go. She was part of the decision of what happened to her all the way through. You are robbed of being able to be part of what they do and when it is time to say enough is enough. If you are not offended by that, it is time we all got offended together but i stood by her, we need people who are not touched personally. If people sitting next to you are a neighbor or you have someone you feel badly for, these are advocates. The care givers, the advocate on the front lines at the Doctors Office in the hospital with the Health Insurers were wearing out. We need to our kids to be angry for us. If you look ahead you see they see their future. We are robbing them of their future. That to me is this huge issue. Join with us. And i have to tell you, if i hadnt become an advocate i would have been sucked deeper into the disease. Being an advocate has saved my life. It has given me a purpose. Alzheimers will win in my house no matter what i do for my husband and my mother. Alzheimers is going to win. I am taking it outside the house and fighting it at a different level and i was recruited to run the foundation and this to me is where we all need to be. We need to step out and to is willing to step out with me . Try it, try it. See what it feels like. Stepped out for someone else. But we have to step up, we have time for one question. You talk in the beginning about victims who have no voice. Another category of victims are the patients or clients of lawyers or doctors or whoever who have symptoms of the disease that the client doesnt understand. How does that person how does the population at large need to be educated to recognize in different kinds of providers as to how to recognize and how to deal with, and assert themselves in terms of a professional is a different category always. How do you how do people learn to identify . If you were an accountant, if you are a doctor, if you are a psychiatrist, you have seen it, you know it, listen to the care giver. We are ignored. No one asks us. We are the closest to the patient. Take us aside. If you suspect something is wrong you are probably right. But it is of very tricky space especially in the early part of the disease, very tricky because you dont want to take the independence away from anyone. As we get older our health and to being independent, what else is there . This is a bankrupting disease, bankrupting for families. 213 billion on care, medicaid spends 24 billion annually on families that go bankrupt trying to take care of loved ones. It is all in slow dancing with a stranger. For those of you on the front lines of the care, i am happy to talk to you personally. I do hope that you consider joining us against alzheimers, women against alzheimers. Now is the time and the other opportunity, the clinical trials. We have learned that we must get ahead of this disease and the prevention space. I have signed up for the a 4 trials, one of 60 sites being run nationally at georgetown, one of the sites. The hardest part is having to admit to being 65, but you get over it. You can get over is that when you think you are doing something for science. Now is the time. These are prevention trials. They are looking for healthy a symptomatic adults. It will take a conversation with 100,000 to get 10,000 to sign up, to get maybe 100, or 50, to actually qualify for the trials themselves. That is why it is important to step up, feel that you are doing do something, do something. Share this story, give the book do some things that will make you feel engaged. Thank you so much for coming. I am really touched on a nice saturday afternoon. This is my only book, by the way, my first and only book. [inaudible conversations] form a line. [inaudible conversations] we dont like these books. Revisit thank you for buying them. 100 [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] you are watching booktv on cspan2 with top nonfiction books and authors every weekend. Booktv, television for serious readers. This weekend on afterwards, scientists talk about the history of the universe. Booktv visits st. Paul, minn. Former outside insider turned u. S. British and danish intelligence double agent recalls his experiences. Also books on American Families in the wake of the recession, the irancontra scandal, war and the constitution and the new book by president obamas half brother, mark obama. For more information on this weekends 48 our television scheduled visit us online at booktv. Org. Heres a look at some books being published this week. Fox news anchor bill oreilly and historian martin dugar on the death of general George Patton died months after the end of world war ii in killing pat and. In the short and tragic life of robert peeze , his College Roommate was raised in newark, new jersey and attended yale university. Colleges professor had their cots richards and provide the history of the Republican Party in to make men freely in landslide, political reporter jonathan darmin looks at how national and state elections of lyndon b. Johnson and Ronald Reagan in 1960s change the american political landscape. Paul barrett, assisting managing editor and Senior Writer at Bloomberg Business week reports on the 20 year legal battle between the citizens of ecuador and the oil co. Chevron in law of the jungle. In who killed the american fa