when so much is at stake?
My Investigation
In the early months following my mother’s diagnosis, I did
what any good son would do: I accompanied her to doctors’
appointments, journal full of questions in hand, desperate to
attain even a sliver of clarity to ease our worrying minds.
When we couldn’t find answers in one city, we flew to the
next. From New York City to Cleveland to Baltimore.
Though we were fortunate enough to visit some of the
highest-ranking neurology departments in the United States,
we were met every time with what I’ve come to call
“diagnose and adios”: after a battery of physical and
cognitive tests we were sent on our way, often with a
prescription for some new biochemical Band-Aid and little
else. After each appointment, I became more and more
obsessed with finding a better approach. I lost sleep to
countless late-night hours of research, wanting to learn
everything I possibly could about the mechanisms
underlying the nebulous illness that was robbing my mom
of her brainpower.
Because she was seemingly in her prime when her
symptoms first struck, I wasn’t able to blame old age. A
youthful, fashionable, and charismatic woman in her fifties,
my mom was not—and still is not—the picture of a person
succumbing to the ravages of aging. We had no prior family
history of any kind of neurodegenerative disease, so it
seemed her genes could not be solely responsible. There