Posted 4-27-19 I am pretty booked up today and tomorrow, but I have a busy week of posts lined up next week. I deeply admire 24/7 caregivers. I spent 8-10 hours directly hanging out with and serving mom this week and my brain is already deflated (the 65 hours at work may have contributed too)….
Tag: brain
Spiders on the Brain
Posted later 2/17/19 For this week’s segment on the brain, I would like to briefly discuss a possible cause of dementia. I am not a neuroscience whiz, nor even a particularly brainy guy, but I love to read literature about the brain and how Alzheimer’s harms it, so I can try to understand the complexities…
The Hippocampus
Posted 2/10/19 Depending on which of the many semi-reliable sources for such information, wild tigers (not in zoos) kill between 50 and 2,000 people worldwide. These ferocious felines (Panthera tigris), according to mascotdb.com, are ranked number two behind the Eagles as the most popular sports mascots in the United States, numbering in the thousands. Hippos, on…
Komputer
Posted 2/7/19 Mom never did embrace the computer world. For years and years, she knew her memory wasn’t good and she had extensive experience with caring for people in nursing homes, so she understood Alzheimer’s. I suspect that she could see the writing on the wall. 🙁 She spent a couple years fighting memory loss playing…
Mom’s Diagnosis
Posted 12/19/19 “There is age-appropriate involution with expected changes of ventricles and sulci, cisterns are not effected. There is no intraparenchymal area of restricted diffusion, mass effect or midline shift. Craniocervical junction is unremarkable. There is findings of partially empty sella. Orbits and paranasal sinuses are unremarkable. There are confluent (re: merging together…this is not…
I Want a Hippocampus for Christmas
12/18/18 I am a brain nerd. I have always been a brain nerd. I love to think about the irony of using my brain to study it. Two of my favorite books in my readings in 2018 were https://smile.amazon.com/When-Air-Hits-Your-Br…/…/0393330494 and https://smile.amazon.com/Power-Habit-What-Lif…/…/ref=sr_1_2… . (Smile.amazon.com lets you donate a small part of your purchase on Amazon to a charity of your choice)…
Routines
Posted 11/19/18 Mom was stressed out today. A visitor came to talk to one of mom’s friends and mom got confused and frustrated by the broken routine… again. The next hour or so was spent speed-pacing the hallway and crying, trying to find my stepdad. By “normal standards”, it wasn’t a big deal. My stepdad…
Unequal Eyes
Posted 11/8/18 I took Mom for a field trip for her eye surgery follow-up today. No new pictures…just a thought: she had one repaired eye and still has one pretty bad eye. It can be challenging for a typical brain to cope with big differences in sight quality between eyes. In an Alzheimer’s/brain bandit patient,…
Noah and the Case of the Mysterious Corn
Posted 10/29/18 Mom was a mess today. I colored with her in her new Noah’s Ark coloring book to begin to settle her down. The human brain is an extraordinary bundle of meat. Think of memories like little pathways from point A to B. Broken pathways=memory loss. The brain desperately seeks rest. Healthy or unhealthy,…