Tacoma Early Stage Memory Loss Forum

On May 11, I attended the Alzheimer's Association Early Stage Memory Loss Forum in Tacoma, WA.  I had gotten an announcement email, and it looked interesting.  So I signed up.  Amy's sister was here from the east coast, so I drove over alone. There were about 40 people in attendance, mostly persons experiencing memory loss and their caregivers.  I'm not sure, but I may have been the only one who came alone. 

The attraction for me was that the first module would discuss how lifestyle changes could affect memory loss.  When I entered the room about a half hour before the program was to begin, I saw from the first slide of the PowerPoint presentation that they were going to be talking about all of the points we make in Beating the Dementia Monster.  So I approached the woman who would be the presenter for the lifestyle module and told her I might be a poster child for her presentation.  I gave her an elevator pitch, and she introduced me to people who were in charge of the whole program.  They asked if I would speak briefly at the beginning of the module, and I said that I would.  She said to keep it to less than three minutes, and I said that I could do that.

After the introductories, and after the lifestyle module began, they asked me to come up and tell my story.  Now, I really did keep my presentation to under three minutes ... but there were questions.  People had lots of questions.  So it was about 20 minutes before I was done, but everyone seemed to have gotten something from what I had to say.

It had cost me $40 to enroll, but the local Subaru dealer paid everyone's tuition!  That was nice.

This week I attended a planning meeting for a similar (but probably larger) Alzheimer's Association meeting here for November.  I will have an hour for my presentation.  I will also be speaking to a meeting of a state-wide association of retirement home professionals in September.