Filed under medicine, News, Research by on May 18th, 2017. Comment. 
She was a friend. Other people sometimes live their entire lives in one place and keep friends for life, but she was more distant, clinging to me loosely, trying to live off free advice. Like almost all the friends I have in one particular region, she was a therapist. Not a bad thing to be, and I believe her to be a competent therapist. But she had the same problem most people in my age group have. She wanted help fighting it.
I suppose the name for it these days is “cognitive loss for age.” Not Alzheimer’s, that “presenile” (the earliest cases described by Kraepelin himself was in mid-fifties) dementia, but getting older.
Mainstream medicine comes up with names and categories and prescriptions, that may or may not offer significant clinical improvement. The human spirit comes up with, well, at least a little good anger. If there is one piece of poetry I quote more than any other, it is Dylan Thomas “Do not go gentle into that good night/Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.” Of course this brilliant Welsh poet, the way I heard it, died of alcohol poisoning in New York; not exactly how I plan to rage against the dying of my light. Oh, how many people who have tried to feed me alcohol I have told I cannot afford to lose any brain cells by that method. I need everything I have to continue to live by my wits. Read more on Advice From A Poet About Memory Loss…
Filed under Alzheimer's Disease, medicine by on Jul 13th, 2010. Comment.
I saw him at a public clinic back in the days when I usually just took care of renewing people’s prescriptions. He seemed rather average for someone in his forties who lived on the streets and looked like he did. But he seemed to want me to know that he was “special,” that there was more for him than just coming in for a prescription refill.
He told me that he was related to a well-known television star currently starring in a popular series. This was Southern California, after all, and I have been involved in more than one case where these relations were real. Sometimes I even get phone calls from celebrities to confirm relations, although more often, I get to see signed pictures. This patient did not have any. I admitted that I had never heard of either the star or the series, which caused this patient a bit of distress.
He started telling me about horrible things his dentist had done to him. Given the state of his dentition, it was likely that he had never had so much as a check-up or teeth-cleaning in his life. Read more on A Biological Cause For Lying?…
Filed under Personality Disorders by on Mar 4th, 2010. Comment.