New words I have learned from Professor Lees

Like most people with Alzheimer’s disease, my verbal memory was the first cognitive domain to be affected. Recently it has rapidly been getting worse.  On my most recent testing with the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), I could recall only one word out of five, even with repeated trials. One casualty of this impairment of verbal memory is that it is now really hard to understand and write about advances in dementia research. I can’t remember things I am reading in a research paper long enough to formulate an essay describing the work. Believe me, it is really frustrating. As hard as it is to remember words I have read or heard, I have had the pleasure to learn several new words from my friend Andrew Lees.

Andrew Lees is Professor of Neurology at the National Hospital, Queen Square, London. We have been exchanging emails for the last couple of years since I read his review of Tattoo, published in Brain. He is one of the titans of British neurology and a world expert on Parkinson’s disease. He is also a wonderful writer and a really interesting guy. I have read two of his memoirs, Mentored by a Madman: The William Burroughs Experiment, and Brainspotting: Adventures in Neurology. He tops my list of interesting people I would like to sit down with and have a beer. At some point he asked me about my favorite pathographies. Pathography? Is that a word? It is. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, pathography is defined as “the study of the life of an individual or the history of a community with regard to the influence of a particular disease or disorder.” In no particular order, my three favorite Alzheimer’s pathographies are 1) Thomas Debaggio, Losing My Mind: An Intimate Look at Life with Alzheimer’s, 2) Greg O’Brien, On Pluto: Inside the Mind of Alzheimer’s and 3) Wendy Mitchell, Somebody I Used to Know: A Memoir. Two non-dementia pathographies that I also recommend include Susannah Cahalan’s Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness, about her NMDA-receptor encephalitis that was at first mistakenly diagnosed as schizophrenia, and Mary Elizabeth Williams’ A Series of Catastrophes and Miracles. Mary Elizabeth is a writer at salon.com who interviewed me for an article about Tattoo. I read her amazing memoir about surviving metastatic melanoma by participating in a phase 1 clinical trial, and we had a very interesting conversation about our respective experiences contributing to medical research.

Last week I emailed Professor Lees to ask if he would be willing to write an endorsement blurb for my upcoming book, Dispatches From the Land of Alzheimer’s. He replied: “ I would be delighted to write an encomium.” That sent me back to the OED: “Encomium – a formal or high-flown expression of praise.” Perfect Andrew, I’ll look forward to your gentle pat on the back.