Regression of the Mind

At memory clinic today, one of the patients was accompanied by her daughter. The patient, in her mid-eighties, was originally from Poland but has lived in Australia for the last forty years. She was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease four years ago and came in today for a follow-up visit. As her daughter described it, the progression of her Alzheimer’s Disease, and her dementia, has made her more and more dependent on her daughter. Besides the lost of her short-term memory, she has almost completely lost her ability to speak English, which she was able to speak fluently before, and now relies on her daughter to translate for her. She happily recounts in Polish stories of her, as a girl, gathering firewood from the forest to make dinner at the eave of Germany’s invasion of Poland.

Ah, the ravage of time, that great equalizer. When people live long enough, few can escape the its grasp. As dementia sets in, the awareness in the early phase evaporates, leaving its victims blissfully oblivious even as it becomes increasingly distressing to their family members. It doesn’t matter whether he might have once been the CEO of a multinational corporation or an ordinary farmer, he simply regresses back to a child-like state. The loss of the ability to make critical judgment, the ability to remember where one lives, the ability to recognize one’s family member, and the loss of skills learned later in life, such as speaking a second or third language, are all part and parcel to the disease. At the end, one becomes dependent even in simple things like feeding and toileting. And thus he leaves this world just like he entered it.

Sometimes I do imagine that if I get to live to the ripe old age when I am babbling in Cantonese, with Mandarin and English, my second and third language, respectively, just a glimmer in the deepest recesses of my atrophied brain, what kind of stories would I be telling my grandchildren or my geriatrician.