If I was to gradually loose my personality and memories forever…

I tried to imagine… what it would be like if my personality was gradually changing and I was slowly forgetting things — and I did not know anything about it. Would I just slip and slip away into a completely different person, not having even a chance of insight, to look back and to at least say goodbye to my memories and the people around me?

And I tried to imagine… would it be worse if I actually knew it, but couldn’t do anything? How would I spend my days while I still had at least a little knowledge of how the “me” was, before I completely forgot and would then never return?

I tried to imagine again… just how painfully sad it would be for the people around me. Especially for those who loved me, or at least loved the person whom I once was. I just hope I would have at least let them known that I appreciate everything they did for me.

Last Friday, after a series of lectures, tutorials, and video sessions on dementia, our whole medical class had the privilege of watching our lecturer interview his patient with Alzheimer’s dementia (a.k.a Alzheimer’s disease), together with the patient’s wife. The couple were in their mid 70s and had gracefully greyed hair. They stepped into our lecture hall of 150 students slowly with their walking canes.

How fortunate the patient was, to have a fully supporting wife throughout the years, our lecturer mentioned. I totally agreed. Indeed God created man and woman to be together, to love and support one another.

Watching them tell their tales, I suddenly felt almost wanting to cry. I did not (of course), but it was the first time a patient interview session made me feel this way. All other sessions were touching, but had no such effect (even one where a mom narrates how her 6 year old child was hit by a truck, became comatose for two weeks, and had a different personality and even a different voice, ever since).

Perhaps, I thought, it was seeing the wife holding her husband’s hand, joking and laughing together as they answered our lecturer’s questions, telling stories of how the wife used to be able to carry her husband when her husband had his sudden faints, but was now no longer able to because of old age.

They knew, as much as we as medical students knew, that one unsuspecting day in a couple of years time, if they had not yet left this Earth, the husband would stare blankly at his wife, having absolutely no idea who she was. He would probably even have forgotten how to talk, how to feed himself, how to get change. And perhaps his wife would be taking care of him, but then again, perhaps not.

Then and there I felt that we are so frail. Even our emotive concepts like “bond” and “love” (that some poets claim to be unfailing and deeply ad aeternum) can be shattered, however much we dislike to admit it.

A few days before that, in a video session, the wife of another patient expressed, “I just can’t spend all my time and energy looking after him anymore… I know he isn’t himself anymore. There is another person living in my husband’s body. He just isn’t the man I used to care anymore.”

Maybe she was right, and she probably was making the right decision. But I wondered how far a person is willing to “love” someone — would it be even to a stage when that someone is clearly no longer himself or herself anymore? What then defines “love and support each other, for better and for worse”?

We watched another video (together with all the ethical concerns of its making) documenting a patient in her final stages of Alzheimer’s disease. It may be impolite for me to describe her in such a way, but I couldn’t help but to think that she was just like a wooden doll. Her muscle tone has increased so highly that her limbs were extremely rigid and stiff. And her big eyes would stare at everyone who helped her get change, fed her and took her for strolls on her wheelchair.

My heart breaks every time I think of that scene.

It is sad, too, that many people need such a tragedy to strike those who are close to them before they are willing to stop… and think of what really is of value, and what really is eternal (if anything is).