Forget to read

Quite a few years ago, I listened on NPR to the interview of a man who was suffering from early Alzheimer's Disease. I think it was early in the medical awareness of the disease. At the time, people used to think that you would not know it if you were afflicted with the disease, because you would forget how you used to be. Reports also tried to reassure you that if you were worried about having it, you were okay, for the same reason as above. That of course turned out to be far from true. The NPR interview was the first time I'd ever heard a person with Alzheimer's talk about his journey into that land, and the man was very articulate, defining his limitations, and regretting how the diagnosis had impacted his life and how it would continue to do so. The man said he, once an avid booklover, could no longer read. The interviewer homed in on this statement, and several times during the interview, asked the man why: was he unable to read the words, or could he not understand what he read. For some reason, or reasons, the man being interviewed could not address the question, despite being very forthright about everything else. I too wondered what he'd meant when he said he could no longer read.

Some years later, I asked a doctor the same question: " Why could a person suffering from Alzheimer's be unable to read?" The doctor, an opthalmologist with a PhD., quickly responded that it was a simple case of their not remembering what they'd read in the preceding paragraph. I am not a doctor, and don't have a PhD, but I don't think the answer is that clear-cut, that what is read is too soon forgotten. I think the letters of the words don't assemble in the same configuration as before, and the words don't connect to the meaning. So reading words is not worth the effort.

I saw Glen Campbell on TV today acknowledging his disease. He hit all the right notes and played all the right chords, and is going on tour. I wonder if he can still read.