26 Wellness & Me
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The burden of caregiving — which 29% of adult Americans carry according to the National Alliance for Caregiving — can make self-care difficult.
By Alice Draper
M
y father was reluctant to get a brain scan.
“A waste of medical aid,” he said. Following a traumatic head accident in 2016, my dad became increasingly forgetful and experienced major behavioral changes. In 2018, the students he lectured at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa voiced multiple complaints that he wasn’t staying on topic during his classes. Eventually, after being persuaded by family members, he got magnetic resonance imaging (an MRI) and was diagnosed with major cognitive disorder. And that was not all: his psychiatrist said that he had generalized cerebral atrophy. We knew that this meant his brain damage would worsen. This year, a computerized tomography (CT) scan showed mini-strokes to his brain, symptoms of vascular dementia.
