The Glass is Half Full

by Bud Focht

Hi, my name is Bud and I am not a doctor, “I just play one on TV.” Remember that soap opera doctor from General Hospital (or was it All My Children) who said that in a commercial for Vicks cough syrup 30-some years ago?

As I said, I am not a doctor “but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.” (Another commercial from more recent times for those of you who are not so old).

No, I am not a doctor, but I have been reading a lot of medical books lately, since my 55-year old wife, Terry, was diagnosed with Early Onset Alzheimer’s Disease.

And I have a plan.

I read that the human brain weighs in at around three pounds and has about 100 billion cells (I say about because I lost count around 99,999,714,420).

The doctors who see the glass half empty say that Alzheimer’s patients can lose up to 40 percent of their brain’s weight and 40 percent of those hundred billion cells, after the tangles and the plaques that are currently forming in Terry’s brain do their evil stuff. Hell, I thought for sure I destroyed almost that many brain cells when I was in college, and my head did get a lot lighter when I finally trimmed my college afro.

I try to be a person who sees the glass half full (hopefully of beer), and I say that Terry will still have almost 70 billion cells still working in that little ‘bean head’ of hers, which is still a shit load of cells. She may not be able to be a ‘rocket scientist’ but that was never one of her goals.

Back to Terry’s ‘bean head’. I have a normal size head (despite having an Abby Normal brain). Our baseball caps in college were fitted hats and I wore a size seven and five-eighths. There was one guy on the team who wore a size eight and three-eighths. I think he was related to Shrek. Most humans wear a size seven and something eighths. I think Terry wears a size five and no-eighths.

I swear she has a pink baseball hat that she wears and the tag says TODDLER. I call it her cradle cap. No way that brain ever weighted three pounds.

So I’m thinking, maybe her problem might be that there just isn’t enough room in her little ‘bean head’ to hold those 100,000,000,000 cells. Maybe she’s having a garage sale to get rid of some unwanted used goods. Maybe her brain is just doing some spring cleaning?

Back to me not being a doctor, as if that last paragraph did not confirm that. And back to seeing the glass half full.

Granted, I have read and witnessed firsthand that parts of Terry’s cute little brain are beginning to not work as well as they should. But there are many other parts of her brain that are still working just fine.  I read that different parts of the Alzheimer’s brain decline at different rates.

So the parts of the brain that are still firing on all cylinders are the ones we are going to concentrate on over the next few weeks, month and years, not the ones that shit the bed. Those cells can kiss my ass and go straight to hell for giving up on my Terry.

Getting back to the ‘glass half full’ mode, some people live with Alzheimer’s for as many as 15 years.  Terry and I always looked forward to growing old together, and since one definition of old is “ten years more than whatever age you currently are” I’ll take a 70-year old Terry. The goal was always 100 but with recent events, I’ll take 70.

Switching back to half empty. There is this organ in your brain called a hippocampus. If you had asked me a year ago what a hippocampus was I would have told you it is the part of the university that houses the 3,000 pound ‘river horses’ from Africa, the ones with the enormous mouths and teeth. Like a big pig on steroids hanging out in the shallow water.

The hippocampus is really a little sea horse shaped organ in the brain that indexes experiences for later recall and helps us access memories.

Well, that little piece of shit sea horse has retired on the job, went and rolled on Terry, and is no longer doing its job. Sea Biscuit (the puppet sea horse in the Diver Dan children’s show my sister and I used to watch around 1960) would have never done that.

The hippocampus has stopped helping Terry remember things, but that doesn’t mean that the data is not in there somewhere, it is just tougher to get at it, to find it. I wonder if we can teach Terry’s brain the Dewey Decimal System.

It is not that Terry forgot what she had for breakfast today; she just needs help retrieving the info. The damn sea horse hippocampus is on the fritz and no longer helps her retrieve data, so that is where I come in. I can help her.

I read that the last things that Terry learned are the first things that get lost. That is why she can no longer work computers, even though she taught a basic computer class to grade school kids. And this is why she has trouble navigating her cell phone functions.

But I also read that the first things that humans learn are the last things that she will lose, so that is where we need to concentrate now.

We all have innate knowledge. Some people call it natural feelings. I call them instincts. Basically it is information that you are born with. Like birds flying south for the winter or salmon swimming upstream. Since that information was present before Terry was even born, that should be the last thing she loses.

And Terry has always had good instincts. Even when it came to dating me. The first time I asked her out I made her an offer that she could not refuse. And she refused.

Terry was (and still is) a big-time New England Patriots fan when I met her, and the Patriots of the late ‘70s, with Steve Gorgan and Randall Cunningham’s big brother Sam, were not that good, but she still loved them.

A very good friend of mine in college graduated a year ahead of me and got a nice job with the NY Jets (he now has a job with the NFL that involves getting yelled at on national TV by a psycho coach when the lights go out during the Super Bowl). My senior year in college he sent me a Jets jersey (this was before you could buy real jerseys in sporting goods stores) with my number on it. My first year out of college when I was working in New England he got me 50 yard line seats for the Patriots-Jets game in Foxboro Stadium, sitting with all of the Jets’ players’ wives. This was a sure-bet, grand slam, slam dunk of a first date. Not only was she going to say yes, I figured I was probably going to get lucky.

She said no.  Some family thing she had to attend. Like I said, good instincts.

Music touches parts of the brain that link what we sense, know and feel. Many times a melody does sound like a memory. So we are always playing music these days. There is no ‘dead air’ in Terry’s world as long as I can help it. Terry’s life from now on will have a soundtrack.

Art is also an area that is hardwired to the brain, and she can still, more than ever, appreciate and respond to it. We have always been Norman Rockwell fans so this summer we are going to visit the traveling Rockwell Museum while it is in Philadelphia (the real one is in Massachusetts and the one that used to be in Philadelphia closed). Philadelphia also has a pretty good Art Museum that we plan to visit, and we may even run up its 72 front steps like Rocky did.

Staying active physically is also very important for Terry. That has never been a problem. The Phys. Ed. major has always been very active and still takes walks with me, with or without our ‘grand-dog’ Harry.

I used to run five miles a day but after a week I had to call Terry and tell her “Hey, I’m 35 miles away from home!”

So we are looking at things differently now (like I haven’t been doing that for a long time now with my Abby Normal brain), as well as looking at different things. We are living for the moment, and we are starting to use the parts of Terry’s cute little brain that still work well.

I will continue to read as many medical books as I can about this horrible disease, and we will use our instincts to determine what is best for Terry’s quality of life.

Still not a doctor, but trying to keep the glass half full, until next time,

Bud