concussions

For as long as I can remem­ber, my father loved act­ing. Into his six­ties and ear­ly sev­en­ties, he was quite active in the the­ater. He played Tartuffe in Molière’s Tartuffe, Nick Bot­tom in Shakespeare’s A Mid­sum­mer Night’s Dream, and the Old Man in Steve Martin’s Picas­so at the Lapin Agile. When he won the role of Scrooge in a local pro­duc­tion of Dickens’s A Christ­mas Car­ol, I was so excit­ed for him that I bought tick­ets way before open­ing night. But he was hav­ing trou­ble remem­ber­ing his lines. Even­tu­al­ly, the direc­tor had to let him go.

To find out what was going on, my mom and dad went to his pri­ma­ry care physi­cian, who referred him to a neu­rol­o­gist. After wait­ing a month for that appoint­ment, the neu­rol­o­gist told Dad to see a neu­ropsy­chol­o­gist, who was booked anoth­er three months out. When that appoint­ment arrived, the neu­ropsy­chol­o­gist gave him a vari­ety of cog­ni­tive tests, includ­ing writ­ten, ver­bal, and com­put­er based. After anoth­er month, the neu­rol­o­gist called us back in and told my father, “You have mild cog­ni­tive impairment.”

“No shit, Sher­lock,” I thought. “That’s why we went to see his doc­tor six months ago.” The neu­rol­o­gist then dis­cussed my father’s oth­er health issues with us, which includ­ed car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­ease, sleep apnea, type 2 dia­betes, and by that point, depres­sion. I then had an inspi­ra­tion. “Dad, when was the last time you used your CPAP machine?” He admit­ted sheep­ish­ly, “I don’t use it. I don’t like it.” [Read more…] about Tak­ing your brain vitals: Sto­ries from a tech­no-opti­mist invent­ing the future of human performance