From the Bookshelf of Ultimate Popsugar Reading Challenge…

While I was in graduate school, we discovered that my grandmother had Alzheimer disease. She was in her mid-eighties at the time, and she'd probably been living with the disease for a while. It's sort of accepted in our culture that 80-year-olds forge

While I was in graduate school, we discovered that my grandmother had Alzheimer disease. She was in her mid-eighties at the time, and she'd probably been living with the disease for a while. It's sort of accepted in our culture that 80-year-olds forget things. My grandfather had died, and she was living alone. I think she, her children, and grandchildren looked the other way for a while. So by the time we figured out that she had Alzheimer's, she was pretty far along in the disease. I was around a lot while she was sick and being cared for. She has nine children and a lot of grandchildren. We cared for her, but there was little we could do but watch this disease systematically disassemble the woman I knew as my grandmother. She didn't know her kids' names. She didn't even remember that she had any children. She didn't know where she lived. She couldn't remember to go to the bathroom when she needed to. I would watch her looking at her own face in the mirror and not understanding the image she saw reflected back. She would care for these little plastic dolls as if they were real babies. It was heartbreaking.

At the same time, as a neuroscientist I found it fascinating. We could see the results of the destruction of her brain, and I wondered about the events that were going on inside—the molecular mechanisms that had gone wrong to produce these deficits. I wondered what it must feel like when those parts of the brain that house your personal history—your sense of self and identity—start to deteriorate. What sort of compensatory mechanisms might be going on? And what does it feel like to go through that? Unfortunately, my grandmother was too far along in the disease to be able to communicate what was going on. I thought it would be interesting to talk to someone about his or her own Alzheimer's who is at the very beginning stages. I understood at the time that this wouldn't be a conversation with someone in their eighties. This would be someone with early onset Alzheimer's. And to my knowledge, the story of people with early onset AD hadn't really been told.