Cool story about Dick Wagner

[Denis]

Lucky guy and good for him!

http://gma.yahoo.com/rock-star-curable-dementia-nearly-loses-career-005311950--abc-news-health.html

[uwe]

My mother had that. The shunt worked wonders - she was reborn in early 2007 -, but it had gone undetected for too long (looking back it might have been ten years, the disesase wasn't well discovered until comparatively recently) so she suffered a brain hemorrhage (that is a risk following a shunt, the doctors had told us) a few weeks later and the effects were thus that really deep dementia set in (she would no longer recognize anyone of us except for short moments) and she died mercyfully that November. I hope Dick Wagner has more luck, but then he is also a younger man (my mom was born 1930).

They do not mention one other symptom in that link in the article: I'll never forget the day when a young neurologist who had finally spotted the disease with my mother asked her the question: "Excuse me asking this, Frau Hornung, but do you sometimes hold conversations with people who you know are dead?" And I thought to myself, now what kind of question is that  , but this is getting interesting.    And my mother (never a spiritual, much less a spiritistic person) pauses for a second and then says: "Yes I do, Herr Doktor, my Uncle Wilhelm, who has been dead for many years sometimes visits me and we sit on a seesaw or a bench and talk (at that point the last seesaw my mother had been near to, much less sat on, had dated back more than a few decades)." She said that completely matter of factly, unembarrassed. The neurologist later on told me that that was his "controlling question" to be 100% sure, and right he was, Liselotte did suffer from hydrocephalus (a disease I had never heard of before at this point).

Not that I would have minded that my mother speaks to her dead uncle if that made her feel good!  The other symptoms were way more serious, the "talking to ghosts" bit can at least be seen with a wry smile. No idea whether there are seesaws or benches in the afterlife, but if there are, I hope the talks with Onkel Willi are good.  

[Dave W]

Interesting story. I had heard of hydrocephalus but not about its symptoms.

[Highlander]

+1

Personally a very sad story, Uwe, but at least mercifully quick...

Sometimes stories are surprising and it beggars belief when you consider the circumstances...

A helicopter crashed in central London yesterday with understandably tragic circumstances - it collided with a crane, obscured in clouds, at the top of a 50 storey luxury residential tower block, and remarkably only the pilot and one pedestrian were killed - this occurred on one of London's busiest intersections at 0800 - a time usually considered "rush-hour"... the pilot was not inexperienced, with over 10,000 hours, over 3000 on the type involved, and so we hear today was quitting and retiring to France... he had requested a divert to the central London Helliport beside the rather enigmatic Pink Floyd LP cover site (which had announced luxury homes last friday and all available - £600MGBP - all sold in 4 days!!!) due to the weather... fate certainly had his card punched...

So, how about fate...?

The top of the crane was knocked off and as there were two operators, at least one of which has worked on the site for over three years, they would almost certainly have been killed...

Both of them, for the first time, had slept in and were late for work...

They are both being hailed as Britains luckiest men...

The website for the tower shows it to be rather luxurious... obviously, a great advert for it yesterday...

NO CHOPPERS ALLOWED!