One day at work a customer came in with a $40,000.00+ check to make a large purchase from my company. I had no idea who this person was or what the check was for, nor what they even wanted to buy! I however knew this person had talked to me before. 

How? I have very specific instructions on how a customer should fill out a check, and this person had followed those instructions. Why didn't I recognize him? I tried to jog my memory and still no dice. 

I was clueless. 

I was getting used to being clueless and learning to live with it. So I thought....maybe it was days ago, or even a month ago that he had come in. 

Maybe he was buying bitcoin and had spoken to me on the phone? I knew I could not ask the person what they were doing in my shop. 

I knew it would seem strange to me if I was holding a check for over forty thousand dollars and the other person had no idea who I was. 

I would think either they have lost their minds or were so rich that my business was meaningless to them. I did not want to convey either of these ideas to my customer so I leaned over and asked my assistant in my quiet voice (if you know me, it's hard to be quiet, but for forty thousand dollars I was giving it a try).

I whispered in my best indoor voice: "Who is this person and what do they want?"

My assistant looked up at me with a very surprised look on her face. Not the "this is a substantial transaction" look, she was used to seeing those. This was a completely different look. 

I knew I was in trouble, I knew it was bad. I mean really bad. I thought to myself: This woman, she knows I have a memory problem, she is used to transactions of this magnitude and she is a pretty cool cucumber, but something has her really upset. I wanted to know what it was.

"Sir...this person was in the shop two hours ago, you spoke to him for a while right here and he placed an order for 1 ounce American Gold Eagles. You bagged up the Eagles and put them in your safe while you waited for him to return from the bank with a cashier's check."

I was floored. I knew immediately the implications of that level of memory loss. If I was already forgetting who people were within hours, I was less than a year away from other serious issues.

When would I forget how to drive? How many months do I have left at the shop before I am unable to do even basic transactions?

 

I was having issues with counting and taking orders. I was already counting things several times and asking customers to double check my math. 

My business was already in jeopardy. Now it looked as if my entire future was too. I wrote a little note to myself to keep me focused on finding a cure. This note was my priceless tool that gave me the strength to continue on.

I was concerned for myself and my future, but I was more concerned for my wife. What was she going to do? Andrea and I got married when we were college age. 

I was an exchange student in Hungary and she was taking business classes at a nearby school. Her entire life was filled with struggle. 

At the age of 13 she and her family escaped communist Romania, risking everything to get across the border to Hungary. 

Many people traveling with her family were removed from the train they were traveling on, she never knew their fate. 

Once free, her family spent the next few months living in a refugee camp. Her experience was very different than the struggles teenagers in America deal with. Because of that, she had characteristics that are very hard to come by. Exceptional hardship creates exception people. She was and is to this day, exceptional.

When we met, I was smitten. I wanted to do things for her, but she was modest. Often when we went out she would only accept water, she would not allow me to pay for anything and she was saving her own money. She didn't allow me to pay, not as an insult, but as a gesture to show she was there to spend time with me and nothing else.

When we married later that year, my main motivation was to offer her something better, a better life, better conditions and particularly a longer life. 

People behind the old Iron Curtain simply did not live as long as Westerners. Seven years into our marriage her father went missing, and seven years after that her mother was diagnosed with cancer. 

Our search to find a cure for her failed and she died two years later. It was devastating and I desperately wanted to change Andrea's course of luck.

That did not seem likely given the current circumstances. 

Clearly, I was next, it was going to be me dying and leaving my wife behind. No amount of money in the world could fix that, and it was going to be hell in the meantime. 

A very large person such as myself will not be easy to handle on his way out. There are major mood swings and cognitive issues that tax the caregiver. I was not worried for myself anymore, I was worried about the woman I fell in love with. 

If there is any mistake people make, this struggle it not about them, its about being responsible to the people around them. As long as there is hope, one has an obligation to try. The search began.

I found there were two camps of thought out there. One was the traditional thought process that said there is no cure. 

I have many friends in this camp and there are many people who even come to our clinic that believe there is no hope. (we opened a clinic to treat cognitive decline after I discovered a way out for myself). 

I could not sit by and let others suffer. Because there is so little time and so many people who need help, I don't have time for the skeptics, those who won't look at information and won't try anything. They are set on believing what they are told by the main stream information networks and their minds are closed to new information.

In my situation I could not afford to be emotionally skeptical, I had to make a decision. To be skeptical meant for me to be worried all the time that the information I was getting was false and taking no action to investigate it. 

That is really what raw skepticism is, an excuse to not investigate and refusal to make a directional decision. No decision is in fact a decision to fail. If you are going to be skeptical, let it be an investigative skepticism not an emotional fear driven one. 

This attitude of keeping a cautions but open mind  is what saved me.

I soon found the second camp and it was filled with hope. Online there was were the likes of Dr. Kresser and other specialists looking for a dietary or hormonal connection to this chronic metabolic disorder and then there was Dr. Bredesen - sure, there were others offering supplements as mono-therapies and miracles with no proof, they ha no numbers or private studies to back up their claims, but there were Functional Medicine protocols created by these Doctors that have real science behind them. People who care about us and work daily to make our lives better. 

To be transparent, I could find no FDA studies, but this is normal when it come to Functional Medicine. 

The FDA does not consider diet and nutrition to be a cure and there is no centralized profit mechanism for pharmaceutical companies to exploit. So when someone tells you there is no FDA study on nutrition as a method of reversing or halting cognitive decline, ask them if they need a double blind study on parachutes before they use one in a dire situation. 

There is literally no one in our corner except these few pioneers of medicine and ourselves. This is the team I bet my life on. 

I worked on few cutting edge programs then I went to the Book: "The End of Alzheimer's" by Dr. Dale Bredesen. This is when I began to see real results. You can buy it at any online bookseller. I strongly suggest everyone buy it. I then found a Bredesen Protocol Group on Facebook and the APOE4.org blog online. This is our team for victory. Never forget that.

Over the years I had met people in my shop who were experiencing cognitive decline. I could do nothing for them as they sold off there goods to pay for treatments that did not work. It left all of us with an empty feeling. 

I wanted to be part of something better, and little did I know a the time my own decline and suffering was going to be the portal that allowed that to happen.

Remember the note that I wrote to myself? It had one very clear message" "Find the cure or die." 

The good news is, if you are on the Bredesen Protocol you probably don't need to write this note to yourself. Stay positive, we are in this together. 

I am working on combining these mountains of supplements we need to take, so life is easier. I have great plans for us, stay tuned and support our efforts when you can.