Posted 1-1-24
To put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. -Eph 4:22-4
Hello all! I have been so wrapped up in the holiday season that I have only just now had a few minutes to hop on the computer to visit. What better time to jump on than NEW YEAR’s DAY!!! Woot!
2024 has a lot of promise. I was thinking about this piece this morning at 6am since I didn’t have the unsleep fortitude to stay up until midnight last night. (I did watch the East Coast ball drop, so that is close enough for me.) Anywhoooo….off I go.
Here are my 10 opening thoughts relating to 2024:
- 24 is evenly divisible into mom’s favorite number…and my fundraising goal: ($)5280. If you divide 5280 by 24, you get 220. The 220th day of the year is, amazingly, exactly one day short of my mom’s birthday. It would have hit it on the nose had it not been for Leap Day this year.
- Speaking of 220, one of my favorite Bible verses is Galatians 2:20. Here it is in context: “For through the law I died to the law so that I might live for God. I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!” Just a head’s up about Protestant Christianity, of whom I am a member: The Law, represented perhaps best by the 10 Commandments, does NOT show us how to become a Christian…It shows us that we are incapable of keeping it and are in desperate need of help from someone who not only could, but did. (Enter Jesus…) This isn’t a Christian blog, but I am a Christian blogger and dig the verse… and the peace through this storm the Bible brings me. 🙂
- There are approximately 120,000 people in Missouri diagnosed with the disease. Divide that number by 24 and you get an even 5,000. A 5,000mAh battery, running at 0.5A/hour, will last 10 hours on a charge. I would love to complete each day of my June event in 10 hours, the .5A/hour chubby body equivalent would need to be faster than I jogged each way 2 years ago. Ain’t gonna happen since I have to do it every day, M-F. However, I will get approximately 160,000 steps in each day, so every struggler will get ~1 and a third steps from me dedicated to them each day.
- Speaking of thirds, my beautiful and talented bride Susan and I celebrate our 33.3rd (1/3 of a century) anniversary this year on…wait for it….March the 4th! I really wish it would have been on 3/3, but we would have had to have gotten matted on 11/1/90 to have had that numerical gem…but it is still close.
- MMXXIV is the Roman numeral for this year. AIM, is our Alzheimer’s Association advocacy group that fights hard to get funding and appropriate legislation to make the lives of those with the disease easier until we can guinea pig our way to a cure. We fought VERY hard in 2023 to get Medicare (part B) and, Medicaid to cover Leqembi, a newly approved drug shown to push back the symptoms for the first time and enter us into the treatment era! After a prolonged battle, partially through explaining how challenging it would be for every person seeking this treatment to be forced to go all the way to St. Louis or KC twice a month for infusions through a clinical study, they relented and now can arrange this treatment to be covered to a great extent by these programs at many more places and without being enrolled in a study. Medicare (M) and Medicaid (M) had to cover 2 infusions (XX) of an IV infusion (IV)…and we did it! Because of this, 2024 will be better for many, many pre-symptomatic folks who are now granted #MoreTime.
- The 24/7 HELPLINE is 1.800.272.3900. 24 hours a day, all year long, they will be answering your calls, ranging from “Where is the nearest support group?” to “Is it normal that my mom sneaks around and spits out her pills?” to “I am clueless what to do here….please help!”. 24/hours per day in ’24, yet again, and made possible by donating.
- According to the authoritative website on such (Housebeautiful.com, of course), the color of the year in 2024 is Peach Fuzz! (color 13-1023) The site explained the color choice thusly: “The color is an evolution of the company’s Color of the Year for 2023, Viva Magenta. Pantone believes that, over the past few years, we’ve come to know our priorities better and appreciate the time dedicated to enjoying the people and places we love. Peach Fuzz reflects that with its warm and inviting color, but the name also reflects the importance of touch. “We selected [the name] very thoughtfully because it’s the tactile aspect of the color that’s so very important as well as the vision of the color,” explains Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute. In the form of a knitted blanket or a faux fur rug, Peach Fuzz welcomes a sense of security and ease. The color also reflects our craving for the past, delight in the now, and hope for life ahead. “Something else we’ve been seeing this whole year is this idea of future nostalgia, reaching back to times when things were simpler,” Pressman adds. “But at the same time, it’s been refashioned to display a more contemporary ambiance—one whose gentle lightness and airy presence lifts us into the future.” —– There is a lot here to digest, but allow me to focus on one line: “The color also reflects our craving for the past, delight in the now, and hope for life ahead.” I deeply crave the past, before the internet, before the TV, and before the false security we have now that distances ourselves from our Creator. I do delight in the now. I see mom as often as I can and laugh “with her” as often as I can. She has a great sense of humor and I am certain appreciates my dad jokes and corniness. Oh, and I yearn for life ahead…and better said, life after this time in a real place called heaven where there is no pain, sadness, disease, traffic jams, bum shoulders, sin, and the rest. In the meantime, we will enjoy our peach fuzzy year of 2024.

- Just a math thought for you here (with apologies for the kids who are out of school and/or are avoiding math.) 2+0+2=4 Is the zero of this equation “meaningful”? Does it really MATTER, as such? I mean, 2+2 by itself is also equal to four, so why bother? I am here to tell you today that the zero may not seem to matter in math (because of WHERE it is in the equation…move it behind a number without the + and things go kerfritz quickly), I commend to you that it does matter. It stands alone in its truthfulness as written, not dependant on other versions of the equation. Read out loud both versions. They are different, yet the same. The zero feels worthless. Meaningless. Long-winded at best, but otherwise void of need to be present. So, is dementia caregiving a zero in the equation of life? I commend to you that it is only worthless at our bequest. We simply must not give up and subsist through these hard times. We cannot let the disease beat us too. We simply must learn and grow and improve from this experience in a way that lets us be a conduit for this experience to make others’ circumstances better when they face this mess too. If we do anything less, we miss out on making just a little sense of the nonsense feeling anger this disease can leave us with. Please, fellow Digital Cornbread partaker, help others with this experience once your time caregiving is done after you have had time to grieve. Don’t let it be a worthless evil. Please.
- 2024 is an election year. Is your candidate one who cares about dementia? As someone who has talked to a good number of politicians, I can tell you that nearly all do care…but they are so inundated with things to care about that it is easy to have them grow cold to the topic, at least inside. That is where our story comes in. The ALZ infographic does a great job sharing statistics and truths…but your story brings it into the realm of real and out of the theoretical. We have Memory Day in Missouri in a couple of months. We gather a bunch of us and meet in Jefferson City to discuss our legislative priorities…sure…but we mainly go to share our stories and explain why these priorities MATTER. Again, from the previous point, don’t waste your story. It is NOT meaningless.
- 2024 is an Olympic year! Wikipedia shares a few points of interest: “Games of the XXXIII Olympiad (French: Jeux de la XXXIII Olympiade) and commonly known as Paris 2024, is an upcoming international multi-sport event scheduled to take place from 26 July to 11 August 2024 in France, with Paris as the main host city and 16 other cities spread across metropolitan France, plus one subsite in Tahiti—an island within the French overseas country and overseas collectivity of French Polynesia.” 33rd Olympics?!?! Just like the 1/3 of a century my bride and I celebrate on 3/4!! Oh, and the dates July 26-Aug 11 include the birthdays if my daughter, my son, and my mom while just barely missing mine and my first child. Pretty cool… Should my mom continue to (somehow) overcome this terrible disease to 15 years, she will turn 80 during these olympics… regardless, she wins a gold metal to me either way.
#EndALZ
Update: Mom is doing about the same. She has had the same lung crud that we all seem to have these days. We have requested more frequent checks, breathing treatments, and morphine on standby. We also discussed seeing to it that she is turned more in bed so she doesn’t get bed sores, an big pain as documented many times in this blog. I hope to see her after work tomorrow and will fill you in. 🙂
I truly with all of you the absolute best in 2024. I have high hopes for this to be a much better year. Thank you all for your donations to this years event, to last years’s and the previous ones as well. 🙂 Thank you for enduring my typos, my sometimes incoherent thought, and perhaps even most, my oversharing. I guess I just don’t want this challenging time to fail to show me what I need to know from it. I will keep fighting and I trust you will as well. 🙂

Editor’s note: No numbers were harmed in the making of this blog post. Some may have been misused here and there, but if so, it was an accident. 🙂 Apologies to my math and English teachers…










