Book Excerpt: 'Losing My Mind'

— -- In Losing My Mind, Thomas Debaggio documents his struggle with Alzheimer's. Diagnosed with the disease in 1999 at the age of 57, Debaggio decided to a write a book that would appropriately describe the effects of the illness from a patient's point of view. Read an excerpt from his book below.

Excerpt from Losing My Mind:

That January, my fifty-seventh birthday, was pleasant and eventful and I began to adjust to middle age. I no longer noticed how small facial lines became wrinkles. I was active and happy. My son Francesco, home from California, joined Joyce and me in the family herb-growing business in Virginia. I was equipped with a thin body free of aches and pains. I looked forward to a life to rival my Midwestern grandmother's 104 years. I was buoyant and displayed, occasionally, the unbecoming arrogance of youth.

Then came a beautiful spring day later that year. It was the day after the tests were finished and the results reviewed. It was the day I was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. What time had hidden was now revealed. Genetic secrets, locked inside before my birth, were now in the open. I became a new member in the parade of horror created by Alzheimer's.

At first I viewed the diagnosis as a death sentence. Tears welled up in my eyes uncontrollably; spasms of depression grabbed me by the throat. I was nearer to death than I anticipated. A few days later I realized good might come of this. After forty years of pussyfooting with words, I finally had a story of hell to tell.

My parents grew up in an orderly, gentle time, or so they remembered it. Their epoch was also full of dirty secrets, enslavement, lynching, and two murderous convulsive world wars. It was a time to need luck. They escaped the influenza epidemic of 1918 and made it through the Great Depression of the thirties when food and jobs were scarce. Luck was with them in small Iowa towns named Eldora and Colfax.

Instead of focusing on the explosive reality of their time, they created a happier personal interval of their own imagining. This in turn created a great optimism in me and a gentle narrative of childhood tranquility. Soon I was scared and uplifted, as were they, by the time of my time, a world of conflagration, disorder, hope, ugliness, great beauty, and unnecessary death. Yet the imaginative world of kindness and promise they passed to me always remained untouched by the ugliness of congested cities, immoral wars, and encompassing greed.

Here I am at the moment of truth and all I can muster are hot screams and scribbled graffiti torn from my soul. Moments of slithering memory now define my life.

After a short, mild winter, a vivid spring settled around us. The weather was tame and herbs filled a sunny patch next to the greenhouse. They were strong and vigorous now, especially the rosemaries, the thymes, the lavenders. Their scents perfumed the air when I brushed by them.

The sun warmed the earth steadily and it was possible to spade and plant a kitchen garden with early seed crops of succulent lettuce to sweeten and color our meals. It was a spring in which you could be happy and a little carefree. There was much the earth had to say and you could hear it if you stayed quiet and listened intently.

There was something else that spring and it was unnameable. As with all unknowns, it was unsettling and had nothing to do with the weather. It was not something that gentle rains, bright sunny days, and an optimistic outlook would cure. It was an anonymous presence, yet I could feel its uneasy cadence. My memory, which had been a sacred touchstone, was failing long before I expected. I was losing the ability to remember things important to me. I had difficulty recognizing the names of many of my plants, and even friends I saw infrequently. I was fifty-seven this year, and not eager to acknowledge that now I might be tied to a teetering mind that had begun a slow descent into silence.

A time or two I complained out loud that I could not remember things that the year before had been brightly colored and detailed. I brushed off those incidents as forgetfulness due to stress, and there was stress aplenty, as there had been always. Stress and worry were steady partners in my backyard farming, just as it was for the farmer in the great, flat Midwest with hundreds of acres of rich, black earth.

I made a living in my backyard for twenty-four years, growing and selling as many as 100,000 herb and vegetable plants from my greenhouse each spring. The entire operation, situated on a 5,000-square-foot lot, contained our family home and a 1,600-square-foot greenhouse. It marked me as a new breed of urban farmer who scorned grass and its wasteful, demanding cultivation. I made a living off the land by selling directly to gardeners the potted plants I started from seeds and rooted cuttings and grew carefully in the greenhouse.

It had always been tough outwitting nature. It was a struggle the mind and body accepted willingly by turning work into games. It was serious and enjoyable play for me, but it was also my livelihood. My family depended on my ability to tame nature and use my guileless skills to attract customers. From the beginning, my tangle with urban farming was a test of my strength and acumen against nature's unpredictability.

I was completing a doctor visit, a regimen that was new and uncertain to me, when my physician asked, "Is there anything you want to tell me?" He is a thoughtful, no-nonsense man with a sly sense of humor, and the question may have been the kind of thing he often says as he winds up a session with a patient.

"Yes, there is," I said. He said nothing and waited for my words. "I am having trouble remembering things that are basic to my work, things I have known and now can't remember."

There was silence while he looked at me. "I can give you a referral," he said quickly, careful not to confuse or cheapen my predicament with some offhand remark. "And I will have the nurse take additional blood samples for the doctor I am sending you to."

I made an appointment to have the blood drawn the next day at the clinic. After I dressed, one of the doctor's assistants gave me a piece of paper with another physician's name, address, and telephone number. I had never seen the name before and it meant nothing to me, but the address was a prestigious university hospital. The first four of many vials of blood yet to be drawn were taken the next day.

Alzheimer's disease was named nearly 100 years ago for Alois Alzheimer, a German who first described the grisly effects of the disease. To gather his knowledge, he cut away the tops of several skulls from people who died of a mind-destroying malady, leaving them helpless, speechless, and as useless as a year-old carrot. He was probably the first to see inside a diseased brain and view the signature features of Alzheimer's, the sticky amyloid plaques and the twisted, hair-like threads of the neurofibrillary tangles. Alzheimer's method of diagnosis after death remains the only way to be absolutely certain of the disease even today. As a result, questions often remain about a diagnosis, a condition that eager charlatans use to their advantage.

In a test of my memory and ability to learn new things, I came out "severely impaired" according to my neuropsychological evaluation. Doctors say I am at the beginning of the disease's onslaught.

For a guy hardly sick in his life, this is a large, corrosive event. I am not alone. In a few years nearly half of those who reach eighty years old will have the disease, according to the Alzheimer's Association. I am not so lucky in another way. The disease is known to strike as early as thirty, but only a tiny minority falls in its clutches before the mid-sixties. At fifty-seven the disease has been active in me for longer than I know.

Instead of bringing this disease into sunshine where we can learn about it and do something, it has been too often hidden and misunderstood, closeted to protect the living from its frightening consequences. Alzheimer's does not have the drama of a heart attack or the thud of an automobile wreck.