Stem-Cell Research Support

Grandfather’s Alzheimer’s Diagnosis Prompts Stem Cell Research Support

The Minaret Published October 12, 2008

Everything’s gone.

You can quickly have everything and just as quickly lose your memory. I know first-hand what it is like to feel you’re losing it all. My grandfather was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease at 77 in 2003.

When he was first diagnosed, it didn’t register with me what was going to happen to him. I thought Alzheimer’s was like the flu: that it would go away. I quickly learned, however, that the disease wasn’t going anywhere but the grandfather I knew was.

Five years after his diagnosis, the disease, sometimes described as “creeping brain degeneration,” has taken its toll on my grandfather and my family.

At first, he could still remember day-to-day and minute-to-minute conversations. Then he couldn’t remember that he had asked how I was doing five times in a three-minute span.

Now, he is in a nursing home because my family can’t take care of him properly.

He has become a child again. When he speaks, it’s broken up and tangled. He calls me a boy because that’s all he can get out. He has no idea where he is or what’s happening to him. He has become aggressive at times and utterly helpless at others.

He’s constantly medicated with Alzheimer’s drugs that do nothing to prevent the disease from eating his memory. He knows who my mother is but he can’t remember that she is his daughter.

It’s one of the worst feelings in the world to watch someone that you love unconditionally be reduced to a medicated vegetable.

My first hand experience with this disease has made me a supporter of stem-cell research. What my family and many other families have had to go through is horrible, and I can’t grasp why people oppose research so much.

I understand religious and pro-life arguments but what I can’t agree with are those who oppose it without knowing what it is. Or even those who oppose it and what if, down the road, they too are diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and they have to go through everything first hand that I and many others have witnessed.

I feel the opposition is in some ways selfish to their own causes.

The major argument with research is over embryonic stem cells. These cells are four to five day old embryos that are donated or scientifically made specifically for the purpose of study. They can be cloned so scientists can make multiple studies of a certain type of stem cell.

Opposing views believe the creation of an embryo automatically makes it is a life and its destruction is killing a life.

Also, when scientists clone embryonic stem cell lines for studies, controversy sprouts from the possibility of devaluing human life with reproductive cloning.

As a supporter of the research, I believe it is necessary to view embryos for scientific purposes only. They are in no way used to create life but are cloned and tested to find possible cures for diseases like Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and cancer. These tests could result in saving many lives.

These problems however are making it harder. Lack of funding and support is holding stem cell research, in its scientific infancy, back from major breakthroughs. It is imperative to this kind of research to help cure and possibly prevent anyone from having to go through what many families have to with Alzheimer’s.

I have to sit here and know there is nothing I can do to save my grandfather from forgetting who I am. But there are thousands of scientists working on stem cell research, which can make a difference and can potentially save millions of lives, if only we all supported the cause.

Every time I visit my grandfather in a nursing home, leaving is the hardest part.

He still remembers me. He says he loves me and holds me tight in his embrace. Leaving means I can’t look back and leaving means the possibility of a next time where my grandfather won’t remember I’m his granddaughter.

My grandfather has lost everything of who he was. He can’t be cured.

But stem cell research can be the cure to our parents’ generation and our generation from having to lose what means the most. And that’s everything.