My Family and Mental Illness (Part 3): The Diagnosis

Sheldon's note: This is a continuing series about my family's struggles surrounding my father's mental health issues when I was a teen. If you haven't already read the previous posts in this series, please read (post 1) and (post 2) before preceding any farther in reading this post.

Several weeks had passed since the day that my father had walked off the premises off the job that he loved as a mechanic, the next day, my mom in desperation, had set up an appointment with the doctor who was treated my father for sleep apnea. This doctor, in addition to running an office where he ran sleep studies that are necessary to be done before someone is fitted with a CPAP or BPAP machine to treat sleep apnea, was also a neurologist.

Because of both the fact that he was a neurologist, and out of all of the doctors they had, he was the one who would listen to her the most. If anyone could help find out what's going, and what to do, he would be the man. Even though she didn't enjoy traffic in St. Louis, she drove us out to his office inside the historic Chase Park Plaza building.

She frantically tried to explain to him what had been happening recently, and she tearfully told him that she was scared that he was starting to develop Alzheimer's. She had taken care of her father for nearly 7 years until his death from complications of Alzheimer's

She was convinced that she was seeing many of the same signs as when her father was in the early stages. This really got the doctor's attention, and he said that he was doubtful that anything would likely show up on brain scans such as MRI's, but there was an extensive physiological test that could be done that would show the effects of most mental disorders as well as brain injury/damage from a stroke (I have long since forgotten what the name of it was).