Send Me More Stories About Neurological & Cognitive Disorders
Every time I misplace my smartphone or forget where I park my car, or blank out on a celebrity name, I flashback to my mom.
One of the earliest signs that Alzheimer’s was creeping into my mother’s life was the heavy pot of leftover pasta she would mysteriously place in the garage. As the disease progressed, she developed a habit of triple checking her bright orange Le Sportsac pocketbook every few minutes to make sure she had everything (lighter, Evian spray, notebook, coin purse), cursing in her mother tongue of French when something was missing. Eventually, she began to get lost inside our two story Cape Cod home in Long Island, so I wrote signs with arrows (<— bedroom, —> living room) so she could find her way around.
By 59, she moved into a nursing home. She passed away at 70. It’s why, as I inch towards 49, any minute lapse of memory makes me cringe.
The AD statistics hover in my psyche. There are 5 million people who suffer from Alzheimer’s Disease in the country, and 5 percent of those have early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease (diagnosed before age 65), which is more likely to be hereditary. I’ve seen Alzheimer’s close up, and it scares me.
I’ve seen Alzheimer’s close up, and it scares me.
So I do what I can do to keep my brain and body healthy and strong. I power walk almost every day. I learn new skills that go against my natural introversion. I joined a Toastmaster’s group. I borrowed Hindi language CDs from the library. Every year I resolve to meditate every day, but I abandon after a 4-day streak. I tried a Bollywood Dancing class. I add turmeric to my tuna salad and soup. I ordered sage tea online. I tried adding coconut oil, bulletproofing my coffee the lazy way, but after two days of bleccch, returned to half and half. I quit Diet Coke cold turkey, because of a study linking drinking diet soda with increased risk of dementia, Diet Coke was my drink of choice. I miss it though.
I’ll admit to clicking on spammy links that pop up in my newsfeed touting supplements that will give me super brainpower. I skim the headlines and close out. But when a recent study proved that an online speed training game from BrainHQ had the possibility of “cutting the long term risk of dementia in nearly half,” I signed up.
I first tested the waters with their free games. My scores were humiliating. The categories are memory, intelligence, brain speed, and navigation. Memory was my weakest. I was around 20 percentile for my age according to their high tech calculations. Was this brain fog or the beginning of my brain’s demise? As I learned that shrinkage of the hippocampus is one sign of oncoming dementia, I set out on a mission to make the hippocampus part of my brain happy and healthy. I upgraded to the premium version, but eventually, I quit: I just don’t want to pay the $14 a month. But I feel guilty about it.
If I end up sharing my mother’s fate, I could be checking into a nursing home in the next ten years. The thought buzzes by me sometimes when I drive by one of the memory care centers in my neighborhood. Well, at least I’d be close to home.
Sometimes, the sense of the inevitable is so strong, I have to remind myself that getting Alzheimer’s myself is far from certain.
Sometimes, the sense of the inevitable is so strong, I have to remind myself that getting Alzheimer’s myself is far from certain. All three of my mother’s sisters lived well into their eighties with other aliments, but no dementia. My last remaining aunt is 99, and lives in an assisted living facility for retired nuns in France. She tells me that her bags are packed, her passport is ready for Heaven, but whenever she knocks on the door, God slams the door in her face.
If there was only a way to know for sure I’d get Alzheimer’s. Maybe then, every time I forget my pocketbook, I wouldn’t have an existential crisis. But would it actually change anything? Would knowing that I had the APOE E4 Gene, which triples one’s risk of Alzheimer’s, make it easier for me to meditate at 5am, or renew my BrainHQ subscription, or stop looking longingly at the Diet Coke in the supermarket? And even if it did, would it make any difference?
My mom had a French woman’s mélange of good and bad habits. She smoked most of her life, drank red wine regularly, snacked on pecans and Camembert, loved painting landscapes, shunned processed food, drank coffee, and practiced yoga and meditation. Was it really one of those habits that doomed her? And, conversely, could any combination of her good habits really have saved her?
Recently, a doctor of mine introduced a new wrinkle: did my mother really have Alzheimer’s? She was never formally diagnosed, and she had two very serious concussions due to car accidents. Could her dementia have been caused, or at least sped up, by the brain injuries she experienced in her youth? If so, my risk of Alzheimer’s is no more or less than average. But does it really matter? As the philosopher Michel de Montaigne wrote, “My life has been filled with terrible misfortune; most of which never happened.” Alzheimer’s can still be my burden, even if it doesn’t run in my family at all.
