Still Alice Paper

Dementia refers to the loss of brain function and Alzheimer’s disease is a form of dementia. It normally attacks old people, but research shows that even the young and energetic can suffer from dementia. Though not totally clear, it is said to be caused by the genes and the environment. Alice Howland is a highly esteemed professor at Harvard University living comfortably with John Howland her husband and three children. The first signs of dementia start showing up when she can’t find her cell phone and she thinks this is normal as her husband normally misplaced his keys, then she becomes disoriented in her home town, and is baffled when she is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in its early stages. We feel for Alice because how she deteriorates and this disease sets in and disrupts her life to such an extent that she resigns from Harvard. At one point she cannot even recognize her own children. She forgets lots of things, loses direction, misplaces and puts things in the wrong places.
Lecture-in a fifty minute lecture, forty minutes later she cannot place her hand on a word she wants to use, she cannot simply find it. She doesn’t know the first letter of the word, though she has a sense of it at the back of her mind, she doesn’t even have an idea of what the word sounds like, or how many syllables it contains .in a nut she no longer knows who she is. Alice herself says that, “I wish I had cancer instead’’, (Lisa 2010). She’d trade Alzheimer’s for cancer in a heartbeat. She felt ashamed for wishing this, and it was certainly a pointless bargaining, but she permitted the fantasy any way .With cancer, she‘d have something that she could fight for and there was a chance that she could win even if she was defeated in the end, she’d be able to look at her family and the Harvard community knowingly in the eyes and say goodbye before she left. Dementia was an entirely different kind a beast. There were no weapons that could slay it, blazing fire consumed all, and no