Sharp again
Mary Ellen Williams looked at the doctor in shock when he told her the bad news: her husband Harold was losinghismemory. In one test he had been given, Harold had only three of been able to recall 30 words.
“The doctor looked at me as if to say,‘How did you miss that he had such bad memory problems?’” Mary Ellen recalls. It wasn’t as if she had overlooked her husband’s trouble altogether, however; that’s why they were at the doctor’s office after all.
Harold first began to notice he was having difficulty remembering things at about age 52. He would forget things he meant to pick up at the store or where he put things. He began writing lists, which he hadn’t done previously, but soon realized he was even forgetting listed items.
“I would get home and realize I hadn’t stopped somewhere,”he says. It sounds like trivial things, he adds, but they added up to something noticeable. His work in mechanical maintenance for high-end communications equipment was affected, and it was worrying.
Mary Ellen noticed changes in Harold too. “He started to repeat the same stories. Or he would point out something as we were driving by that he had pointed out just a few days earlier.”
Neither had realized quite how bad the situation was until his test
