Alzheimer's Disease Took My Grandfather

On rare occasions, he would remember my name.

He could sometimes be encouraged to sing a song from his childhood, those deep seeded neurons among the last to succumb to the dementia, but not even his most innate brain functions would go unaffected in the end.

By Citizen Correspondent Daniel McIsaac

Date Posted: 11/19/08

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When I think of my grandfather I remember one particularly dry summer in Massachusetts. Every Wednesday I went to my grandparent’s house to mow their lawn. The grass had been dead for weeks, but I fueled the mower and paced over every inch just the same. When I finished I would go inside and visit with him, though I knew he would probably not remember who I was.

My grandmother and I would talk as my grandfather stared at the blue shag carpet from his armchair. She would tell me about how he gets lost and cries, and I’d catch his eyes and give him a smile. He always answered it with a big gorgeous grin that I don’t ever remember seeing before the onset of Alzheimer’s Disease. My grandmother would test him on the identity of their visitor. Sometimes my name would escape his dry throat.

My mother was the first to put it together. Ever since the heart surgery, he had not been the same. While we were aware of risk the involved in this major surgery we were not prepared for the accelerated dementia that followed his quadruple bypass.

As far as we were concerned, there could be no denying the connection, but no mention of the risk had been made prior to the surgery. If no correlation had been detected in the past, we wondered how such a connection, so obvious to us, could have gone undocumented.

In fact, it hadn’t. In 1997, at the same time as my grandfather’s surgery, a small preliminary study of 65 patients was being conducted at Duke University. According to the report appearing in Science Daily, some degree of neurological damage was known at that time to affect as many as 75 per cent of lung and heart bypass surgery patients.

The damage, which is not typically permanent, was thought to be caused by small blood clots or fragments of plaque that become dislodged during surgery and travel to the brain. The study suggested that patients with the Alzheimer’s gene are more susceptible to the resulting nerve damage.

Meanwhile, my family and I watched helplessly as my grandfather began to descend into the grip of dementia.