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Stolen Mind: The Slow Disappearance of Ray Doernberg
Ray Doernberg had a rare brain disorder related to Alzheimer's disease. Myrna Doernberg's account of Ray's battle will move readers with its unflinching look at the limits of modern medicine and the strength of the human spirit.
223 pages, Hardcover
First published March 1, 1986
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 10, 2013
Of the many personal reports I’ve read about Alzheimer’s this is among the most detailed, sometimes the most brutal, as Doernberg shows us how hard it can be for a caregiver to look after a dementia patient, from earliest symptoms to death. I think some readers might find it overwhelming—but once I started reading the book, in the early days of my father’s advanced, second-stage Alzheimer’s, I could not put it down.
Ray Doernberg, as it turned out, did not have Alzheimer’s, he had Binswanger’s disease, an extremely rare (fewer than a hundred cases in the U.S. when this book was written) degeneration of the brain caused by narrowing of the blood vessels and small strokes. But his dementia, which came on in the early eighties, now looks indistinguishable, at least to the layman, from Alzheimer’s—and in fact was only determined by an autopsy after he died in 1984.
Stolen Mind is not the work of a subtle writer. Myrna Doernberg tells an emotional story of her courtship and marriage, and includes such unaffected lines as “I always felt special because Ray loved me,” and “Marriage was more than I ever dreamed it would be.” But as she says in her introduction, “If there is a book in each of us, this is mine.” She has a powerful story to tell, and in scene after scene, as her husband’s mind goes awry, the facts sweep us along.
The book came out in 1986, and is one of the earliest dementia memoirs I know of. I think today an editor might cut a third of it—but I’m glad this didn’t happen. Here is the full story, unrelenting, painful and repetitive. And all of it, every detail, I read with fierce attention: how Ray, a skilled designer, could no longer draw. How he couldn’t mow the lawn or make a cup of coffee, how he got lost in his own bathroom, how he defecated on the bedroom floor.
I read it all in flood of recognition and premonition. The book was repetitive, but no more repetitive than my own days looking after my father—and here was someone who knew. Who knew, in fact, a good deal more than I did of what was to come.
“How can I describe,”the author writes, “what it was like to watch someone you knew as a vital, bright, alive, alert human being die mentally in front of your eyes?” But that’s exactly what Doernberg describes, minutely, thoroughly, and to devastating affect.
Ray Doernberg, as it turned out, did not have Alzheimer’s, he had Binswanger’s disease, an extremely rare (fewer than a hundred cases in the U.S. when this book was written) degeneration of the brain caused by narrowing of the blood vessels and small strokes. But his dementia, which came on in the early eighties, now looks indistinguishable, at least to the layman, from Alzheimer’s—and in fact was only determined by an autopsy after he died in 1984.
Stolen Mind is not the work of a subtle writer. Myrna Doernberg tells an emotional story of her courtship and marriage, and includes such unaffected lines as “I always felt special because Ray loved me,” and “Marriage was more than I ever dreamed it would be.” But as she says in her introduction, “If there is a book in each of us, this is mine.” She has a powerful story to tell, and in scene after scene, as her husband’s mind goes awry, the facts sweep us along.
The book came out in 1986, and is one of the earliest dementia memoirs I know of. I think today an editor might cut a third of it—but I’m glad this didn’t happen. Here is the full story, unrelenting, painful and repetitive. And all of it, every detail, I read with fierce attention: how Ray, a skilled designer, could no longer draw. How he couldn’t mow the lawn or make a cup of coffee, how he got lost in his own bathroom, how he defecated on the bedroom floor.
I read it all in flood of recognition and premonition. The book was repetitive, but no more repetitive than my own days looking after my father—and here was someone who knew. Who knew, in fact, a good deal more than I did of what was to come.
“How can I describe,”the author writes, “what it was like to watch someone you knew as a vital, bright, alive, alert human being die mentally in front of your eyes?” But that’s exactly what Doernberg describes, minutely, thoroughly, and to devastating affect.
September 26, 2008
More research.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews