When I tell people my story, I'll be met with surprise and, sometimes, disbelief. "That doesn't happen," I've been told. When we wrote the second edition of Beating the Dementia Monster, I followed some leads to find others with similar experiences whose stories I could include in my book, but I couldn't find enough compelling cases to make it work.
And sometimes I begin to doubt the diagnosis myself. I see what's happened to so many others after their diagnoses, and I wonder, why not me too? So I go back to doctors to hear, "We won't know for sure until the autopsy, but it's almost certainly AD." And if I remember back to how life was in 2015, it's hard to escape recognizing the hole I was falling in to.
The problem is that very few people have made the radical lifestyle changes I've made in a manner that can be related to their effect on brain health. We cited several studies in Beating the Dementia Monster, where this has been done, but I had a hard time finding interesting anecdotes to help my narrative.
But I did recently come across an interesting story that seems to parallel mine. It's the story of Dr. Rebecca Chopp, who was diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment at about the same age as I was. Dr. Chopp was chancellor of the University of Denver after being president of Swarthmore College and Colgate University. Like me, she took on the challenge with respect to life style, and she seems to have experienced similar results. And, like me, she was motivated to write a book about her experience. It will be called Still Me; Accepting Alzheimer's disease without losing yourself. It's due out on Amazon early next year, but should be available for pre-order in November.
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