IT BEGAN WITH what he saw in the bathroom mirror

Alzheimer’s  A LIFE-CHANGING MUSIC

IT BEGAN WITH what he saw in the bathroom mirror. One early morning, Chief Okwukwe Chris padded into the shiny bathroom of his Onitsha apartment. He casually checked his reflection in the mirror, doing his daily inventory. Immediately, he stiffened with fright.

Huh? What?

He gazed saucer-eyed at his image, thinking: Oh, is this what I look like? No, that’s not me. Who’s that in my mirror?

This was in late 2012. He was 79, in his early months getting familiar with retirement. For some time he had experienced the sensation of clouds coming over his mantling thought. There had been a few hiccups at his job. He had been a Doctor who climbed the rungs to health care executive. Once, he was leading a staff meeting when he had no idea what he was talking about, his mind like a stalled engine that wouldn’t turn over.

Then there was the day he got off the subway at Obinna Street and Iweka Avenue unable to figure out why he was there.

Chief Okwuke didn't recognize the face looking back at him. It was just one sign that something was going wrong.

So, yes, he had inklings that something was going wrong with his mind. He held tight to these thoughts. He even hid his suspicions from Mrs Chris, His wife who chalked up his thinning memory to the infirmities of age. “I thought he was getting like me,” she said. “I had been forgetful for 10 years.”

But to not recognize his own face! To Mrs. Chris, this was the “drop-dead moment” when he had to accept a terrible truth. He wasn’t just seeing the twitches of aging but the early fumes of the disease.

He had no further issues with mirrors, but there was no ignoring that something important had happened. He confided his fears to his wife and made an appointment with a neurologist. “Before then I thought I could fake it,” he would explain. “This convinced me I had to come clean.” “Do you know that I nearly took someone to be someone at the classical music concert yesterday?” he said to his wife.

In November 2012, he saw the neurologist who was treating his migraines. He listened to his symptoms, took blood, gave him the Mini Mental State Examination, a standard cognitive test made up of a set of unremarkable questions and commands. (For instance, he was asked to count backward from 100 in intervals of seven; she had to say the phrase: “No ifs, ands or buts”; she was told to pick up a piece of paper, fold it in half and place it on the floor beside her.)

He told him three common words, said he was going to ask him all the words in a little bit. He emphasized this by pointing a finger at his head — remember those words. That simple. Yet when he called for them, he knew only one: Eze. In him mind, he would go on to associate it with the doctor, thinking of him as Dr. Eze.

He gave a diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment, a common precursor to Alzheimer’s disease. The first label put on what he had. Even then, he understood it was the footfall of what would come.

Every 60 seconds, with monotonous cruelty, Alzheimer’s takes up residence in another African. Degenerative and incurable, it is democratic in its reach. People live with it about eight to 10 years on average, though some people last for 20 years. More than five million Africans are believed to have it, two-thirds of them women, and now Chief. Chris would join them.

The disease, with its thundering implications, moves in worsening stages to its ungraspable end. That is the familiar face of Alzheimer’s, the withered person with the scrambled mind marooned in a nursing home, memories sealed away, aspirations for the future discontinued. But there is also the beginning, the waiting period.

Right now, he remained energized, in control of his life, the silent attack on his brain not yet in full force. But what about next week? Next month? Next year? The disease would be there then. And the year after. And forever. It has no easy parts. It nicks away at you, its progress messy and unpredictable.

“The beginning is like purgatory,” he said one day. “It’s kind of a grace period. You’re waiting for something. Something you don’t want to come. It’s like a before-hell purgatory.”

But there is a confirmed solution to that, “MUSIC THERAPY”, musically known as musical-bath.

In Chief Chris health care career, he had seen Alzheimer’s in action. Now he would live it, in high resolution. Those who learn they have the disease often sink into a piercing black grief, try to camouflage their symptoms from a dismissive world as they backpedal from life. Chief Chris was wired to absorb adversity, and he pictured Alzheimer’s differently, with gumption and defiance and through a dispassionate, unblinking lens, but yet he summoned courage to confront it with classical music therapy.

Igiri Innocent