Required Reading

I have been so good during this pregnancy. By "good," I mean downright heroic because I haven't consulted Uncle Internet for information about the health of my pregnancy. As I learned when pregnant with Sadie, the only thing Uncle Internet will tell you about your pregnancy is that your baby will be born without some vital organ and you can thank a rare strain of listeria for that. So, after torturing myself with message boards and listservs full of horror stories that scared me to death, I have kept away.

This is a very good thing. I can do crazy without the help of the world wide web.

But, there are other sources. I decided to pick up some light reading the other day and picked up a book called "Still Alice." It looked pleasant enough and my college roommate's name is Alice and I adore her, so I thought it was a good sign. And it was pleasant enough until I hit page 92, when the titular Alice discovers she has early on-set Alzheimer's disease. Well, that sucks. The author has a Ph.D. from Harvard so there's plenty of science in there. There's information about the genetic test for Alzheimers and if you have the gene, there is a 50% chance that your kids will get it to. "Early onset" in this case is 50 years old. My palms got sweaty as I remembered that my paternal grandfather died of Alzheimer's disease.

Can you see where I went with all of this?

It went something like this:

"Oh my god, my mom's dad died of Alzheimer's, so now my kids have it and so do I. Cherry Blossom will only be 13 when I get Alzheimer's and start forgetting school appointments, my name, and whose room belongs to whom. OH MY GOD, I should have never had children. Sadie will only be 15 when I get it. OH MY GOD, WHAT HAVE I DONE?."

So, looks like I have to ban recreational reading as well. And, here I patted myself on the back when I bought the book because I eschewed the one about the step-mother who's step-daughter disappears on her watch.

Am I really going to have to start reading those damn vampire books to keep my mind out of trouble?

Say it ain't so.