Working in Air Force hospitals during the Vietnam years, I encountered more than a few brain injuries culminating in various personality changes. Sometimes there was violence, and sometimes blank stares were as placid as pools of water. It wasn't uncommon to find patients with various mental disorders lulled into zombie status with Thorazine and other potent anti-psychotics. I clearly remember one young man, an Air Force dependent whose brain was traumatized from a serious car accident, whose motor skills were all messed up, but he did manage to scrawl out a shaky note for me when I asked him what happened.
Brains are in the news a lot lately, primarily because of actor Bruce Willis's frontotemporal dementia and Diane Sawyer's ABC-TV report about his slow mental decline. For my part, I was surprised to learn that actor Johnny Crawford had died from dementia two or three years ago. Having grown up watching him as young Mark McCain on TV's "The Rifleman," just a few years younger than he, his passing via such a terrible brain disease was hard to believe.
Yes, brains are strange people. Many years ago when my mother developed a tumor in the worst possible area of her brain, I cared for her at home. Surgery was attempted, but such an incursion only made her condition worse as she forfeited so much of her very being to the tumor. Her doctor assumed she would only live a month or two at that stage, but her will to live and I kept her going for a year and a half. One can provide care, but there is no winning in the end.
Currently, I find myself confronted with dementia in another family member, a cousin whose troubled brain commanded him to drive across two states until he eventually ran out of gasoline, suddenly not knowing who he was, where he was from or where he was going. In so doing, he was shuffled from hospital emergency room to a nursing facility whose care has cost him pretty much all the money he had saved to purchase a house in another state. Though physically fit, the remaining course of his life will slope downhill at a slow pace in a nursing institution. As I thought back, I remembered that his father, too, had perished from dementia, a somewhat rare form known as Binswanger's dementia.
We are all getting older, and predictions for dementia overtaking us -- and even young people -- exponentially are frightening. The reasons may be complex, but we shouldn't be surprised if a lack of proper nutrition in our food sources, as well as substances with which we pollute our living space, play a significant role.
Whether AI, Elon Musk, new drugs or ??? can diminish dementia's forces remains to be seen, but complicated brain disorders on the rise apparently have no intention of disappearing any more than will our shadows under a street light.
