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Authors: Allan H. Ropper
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weeks ago. What made you come back to the hospital?” Hannah continued.
“I got fuzzy thinking. I was thinking fuzzy.”
It wasn’t clear what he meant by that. As cogent as his answers seemed, two things about Wally were definitely off. One, we soon discovered, was that he would drop off to sleep for short periods of ten orfifteen seconds in the middle of a conversation. The first time it happened, I was concerned that it might have been a seizure.
“Are you with us now?” I said, trying to assess his orientation.
“Yes.”
“I thought you might have just had a little seizure.”
“No, I fall asleep.”
“You just fell asleep right now?”
I had him count backward from one hundred to see whether it might elicit a blank moment that signaled a seizure, but it didn’t. He made it to zero without an error.
“Are you a talkative guy by nature, Wally?”
“No,” he answered, then thought about it. “Let’s put it this way . . .” Then he paused, and smiled. His neighbor on the other side of the curtain yelled out: “HE GETS STUCK ON THE RED SOX!” That, as it turned out, was Wally’s second problem.
“I guess I am talkative,” he said sheepishly. “I guess I talk a lot.”
This would become evident over the next few days. He routinely parked his wheelchair at the door to his room and flagged me down whenever I walked by, convinced not only that I was his neurologist, but that I was at the same time a heart specialist named Sanjay Sanjanista, and that I had performed the miraculous surgery that had brought his wife back from the brink of death several years earlier.
Wally Maskart had arrived on the ward in the depths of a confusional state that frustrated all of our attempts at diagnosis. He was depressed, sometimes manic, never at a loss for ideas, but frequently at a loss (due to his COPD) for the breath with which to voice them. Upon meeting him, I recognized that the demons besieging him were so deeply entrenched that we might never arrive at a diagnosis. To pass the time, I assigned Gil, one of the medical students on the team, the task of tracking down Dr. Sanjanista. He came back and informed me that no such person existed, and that his best guess was that Sanjay was a chimera inspired by a memorable if not particularly talented contestant on American Idol named Sanjaya. Despite his vocal flailings,Gil informed me, Sanjaya’s looks had earned him a cultish female following known as Sanjanistas, whose mission in life was to stuff the online ballot box in order to overextend Sanjaya’s stay on the show. As if that weren’t enough, Wally also got it into his head that I had scored the winning touchdown for Boston University in a memorable game against Northeastern in 1962. “I was there!” he told me. Alas, I wasn’t.
Wally’s insistence on his personal connection with me could have been discounted out of hand were it not for his precision on other points, such as his ability to recite the decimal expansion of e (the base of the natural logarithm) to twenty decimal places. He even wrote it down, and I confirmed that he was indeed correct. He could also diagram the chemical composition of acetone, and seemed well versed on the career of the Red Sox right fielder Dwight Evans, except for his claim that Evans had just died. Evans, Wally insisted, had been callously traded to the Mets near the end of his career, an assertion that Gil was able to refute via a Google search, although Wally wouldn’t accept it. He also claimed he had been at Game 6 of the 1975 World Series, and witnessed Evans make “The Catch.” At that moment, he had turned to his son and said, “Tommy, sit down and relax. God’s on our team’s side. There’s no way they’re going to lose this game.” And he was right. Carlton Fisk won it for the Sox with an historic home run in the twelfth.
Wally also told me that he had his eye on a prewar tinplate locomotive that I knew cost around $2,000.
“You didn’t
“I got fuzzy thinking. I was thinking fuzzy.”
It wasn’t clear what he meant by that. As cogent as his answers seemed, two things about Wally were definitely off. One, we soon discovered, was that he would drop off to sleep for short periods of ten orfifteen seconds in the middle of a conversation. The first time it happened, I was concerned that it might have been a seizure.
“Are you with us now?” I said, trying to assess his orientation.
“Yes.”
“I thought you might have just had a little seizure.”
“No, I fall asleep.”
“You just fell asleep right now?”
I had him count backward from one hundred to see whether it might elicit a blank moment that signaled a seizure, but it didn’t. He made it to zero without an error.
“Are you a talkative guy by nature, Wally?”
“No,” he answered, then thought about it. “Let’s put it this way . . .” Then he paused, and smiled. His neighbor on the other side of the curtain yelled out: “HE GETS STUCK ON THE RED SOX!” That, as it turned out, was Wally’s second problem.
“I guess I am talkative,” he said sheepishly. “I guess I talk a lot.”
This would become evident over the next few days. He routinely parked his wheelchair at the door to his room and flagged me down whenever I walked by, convinced not only that I was his neurologist, but that I was at the same time a heart specialist named Sanjay Sanjanista, and that I had performed the miraculous surgery that had brought his wife back from the brink of death several years earlier.
Wally Maskart had arrived on the ward in the depths of a confusional state that frustrated all of our attempts at diagnosis. He was depressed, sometimes manic, never at a loss for ideas, but frequently at a loss (due to his COPD) for the breath with which to voice them. Upon meeting him, I recognized that the demons besieging him were so deeply entrenched that we might never arrive at a diagnosis. To pass the time, I assigned Gil, one of the medical students on the team, the task of tracking down Dr. Sanjanista. He came back and informed me that no such person existed, and that his best guess was that Sanjay was a chimera inspired by a memorable if not particularly talented contestant on American Idol named Sanjaya. Despite his vocal flailings,Gil informed me, Sanjaya’s looks had earned him a cultish female following known as Sanjanistas, whose mission in life was to stuff the online ballot box in order to overextend Sanjaya’s stay on the show. As if that weren’t enough, Wally also got it into his head that I had scored the winning touchdown for Boston University in a memorable game against Northeastern in 1962. “I was there!” he told me. Alas, I wasn’t.
Wally’s insistence on his personal connection with me could have been discounted out of hand were it not for his precision on other points, such as his ability to recite the decimal expansion of e (the base of the natural logarithm) to twenty decimal places. He even wrote it down, and I confirmed that he was indeed correct. He could also diagram the chemical composition of acetone, and seemed well versed on the career of the Red Sox right fielder Dwight Evans, except for his claim that Evans had just died. Evans, Wally insisted, had been callously traded to the Mets near the end of his career, an assertion that Gil was able to refute via a Google search, although Wally wouldn’t accept it. He also claimed he had been at Game 6 of the 1975 World Series, and witnessed Evans make “The Catch.” At that moment, he had turned to his son and said, “Tommy, sit down and relax. God’s on our team’s side. There’s no way they’re going to lose this game.” And he was right. Carlton Fisk won it for the Sox with an historic home run in the twelfth.
Wally also told me that he had his eye on a prewar tinplate locomotive that I knew cost around $2,000.
“You didn’t
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