My father’s problems, we realized, were on a different plane.įor his part, my father seemed unconcerned. As cardiologists, we understood diseases of the heart. So, despite nearly four decades of medical experience between us, my brother and I decided our father needed the attention of a specialist. “Not that much, but I’m not sure he knows what he’s doing.” When we voiced our concerns, my father said it was his money and that he would spend it the way he wanted. “Two fifty here, hundred there,” Rajiv said. Nearly every week he was sending cash to random charities in response to generic emailed or televised appeals.
He was booking hotel and flight reservations but neglecting to cancel them-something my older brother, Rajiv, discovered only after he began to monitor my father’s bank accounts. For example, he had always been careful with his money, a consequence of an impoverished childhood, but now he was bouncing checks. Since their arrival, I had come to suspect that his symptoms were not the usual age-related cognitive changes, even if he kept saying they were. He and my mother had moved to Long Island, where my brother and I lived, several months earlier. “Well, no one can remember everything,” he muttered. He thought for a moment, then sniffed defiantly as my point came across. “So what did you have for lunch?” I asked, staring ahead.
Any lapses, he had been insisting, were normal for a man of his age. “Because your memory is getting worse,” I answered. We were sitting in the waiting room of the same neurology practice that was treating my mother’s Parkinson’s disease when my father asked me, perhaps for the third time, “Why am I here?” Introduction: They Used to Call Me Topper Book excerpt: 'My Father's Brain: Life in the Shadow of Alzheimer's' Here & Now's Deepa Fernandes speaks with author and cardiologist Sandeep Jauhar about his new book " My Father's Brain: Life in the Shadow of Alzheimer's." It intertwines information about the disease and how it's treated with his own family's story of coping when his father developed Alzheimer's. The cover of "My Father's Brain: Life in the Shadow of Alzheimer's." (Courtesy of Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
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