I’m learning a lot from my “seatmates” on this trip to meet with Dad’s doctors. On the puddle-jumper flight from Charlotte to Greenville, I sat next to a cardiovascular surgeon. He had come to North Carolina from Wisconsin to learn how to use the new robot his hospital had bought for heart surgery.
“What brings you to Greenville?” he asked. I told him I was looking for answers on my Dad’s dementia, and that his doctors were presenting the results of his autopsy.
“Don’t expect a lot of answers,” he warned me. “We just don’t know much about the brain.”
“But I thought you could get a definitive answer about whether someone had Alzheimer’s by looking for plaques and tangles in the brain during an autopsy.”
“Well, the problem is that when you do an autopsy, you see the endpoint, but you don’t see the process. The endpoint might look the same for a lot of different diseases.”
“Hmm, so maybe Dad’s autopsy would show plaques and atrophy whether he had Alzheimer’s Disease, vascular disease, or something else?”
“Yes, possibly, but I’m not a neurologist.” I got the feeling he was happy to be working on hearts rather than brains.
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