The Disease Sets In
Clive often worked until midnight seven days a week, and his
routine was no different in the spring of 1985, when he first
became ill. "He came home one night complaining of a headache,"
recalls Deborah. "It was nothing remarkable."
But the next day, a Monday, Clive's teeth were chattering, and his
headache was so severe that he described it "as though someone is
hitting me with a hammer." Deborah told him to stay in bed and
phone her at work if he needed anything. "I can't remember your
number," he said, though he called her at her office daily. When
she gave him the number, she noticed that he wrote "Deborah
Wearing" next to it, as if he didn't know her well.
Alarmed, Deborah called their doctor, who diagnosed flu and
prescribed a painkiller for the headache. Two days later, after
Clive told his wife he couldn't remember her name, she contacted
the doctor again. He said that a local outbreak of an influenza
strain mimicking meningitis was the cause of Clive's confusion.
When Deborah returned home later that afternoon, she found Clive's
bed empty and no sign of him in the apartment. She checked with
neighbors, phoned the doctor and police.
"He's only been missing a few hours," an officer said. "If he's not
back by morning, call us again."
Hours later, as she was beginning to despair, the phone rang.
Police from a nearby station told her Clive was with them, okay but
confused; he couldn't remember his address. When Deborah brought
him home, he walked right by the entrance to their building.
Clive's temperature had risen to 104, so Deborah called an
ambulance, and he was rushed to the hospital. There, he began
slipping in and out of consciousness. "Stay with me, darling. Stay
with me. I love you," Deborah urged in panic as doctors ordered a
CAT scan and a spinal tap. Eleven long hours later, a physician
told her that Clive had encephalitis -- an inflammation of the
brain -- caused by the cold sore virus. "There's an 80 percent
chance he'll die," he said.
"But he's never even had a cold sore," a stunned Deborah
responded.
"The virus lies dormant in most of the population without
symptoms," the doctor explained. "Very, very rarely it goes to the
brain."
Just days earlier, the couple had talked about starting a family.
Clive had three grown children from a previous marriage, but he and
Deborah wanted two together. "I was hoping to get pregnant soon
because Clive was getting older," she says. "Now I was being told
it was likely my husband would die."
Over the next two days, Deborah spent every hour she could at
Clive's bedside. On the third day, Deborah watched helplessly as
Clive began having major seizures. In a fog, she listened as an
attending physician told her Clive could end up a vegetable.
Her husband was treated with acyclovir, an antiviral drug that had
just come on the market, but the virus had already caused his brain
to swell. As it pressed against the unforgiving bone of the skull,
it literally crushed itself. In the weeks that followed, Clive
stabilized, his headaches subsiding, his temperature returning to
normal. But scans would show that his brain had been virtually
mulched.
Prof. Barbara Wilson, PhD, an internationally acclaimed Cambridge
research scientist specializing in memory and knowledge, says, "The
virus caused the destruction of Clive's brilliant mind."
"Not only had he lost his past," says Deborah, "he couldn't store
any new memories." His speech was scrambled, and he used the word
chicken to describe everything. When a doctor asked him what a tie
was, or a pen, he would reply, in his authoritative voice, "a
chicken." Then he started speaking backward. He suddenly remembered
Deborah's name but pronounced it in reverse, as "Harobed."
Damage to his frontal lobes, which play a role in behavior and
personality, caused a host of other peculiar symptoms. When Clive
used an electric razor obsessively, shaving his face long after his
facial hair -- including his eyebrows -- was gone, physicians
realized he was suffering from a condition called perseveration,
causing him to repeat behaviors endlessly. He went through periods
of being maniacally childlike, popping out of closets to surprise
people -- even jumping out of moving cars when taken off hospital
grounds for brief visits home.
Then, three months after his hospitalization, Clive started having
violent episodes. He banged nurses' heads against the wall, threw
chairs, and even knocked Deborah to the ground. "I should have been
frightened," she says, "but somehow I wasn't. This was still the
man I adored. I knew it was the brain damage that made him out of
control."
The episodes drove other family members and friends away, and at
night, home alone, Deborah would throw herself on her bed and
literally howl in anguish, yearning for the man she married.
Through it all, Clive maintained some understanding that Deborah
was his wife. His doctors say this is because emotional memory is
stored in a part of Clive's brain that was less affected by the
virus. "As ill as he was," Deborah says, her face softening, "he
could still look into my eyes, and tell me he loved me."
That same emotional memory also made Clive aware of his loss. It
was heartbreaking, says Deborah, to watch him attempt to understand
what was happening to him -- and fail. He would sob, she says.
"Imagine trying desperately to grasp who you are and not being able
to."
One day, Deborah sat Clive down at the hospital chapel's organ,
placing a piece of sheet music in front of him. He began to play.
"It was like someone had given him a gift," says Deborah. Though he
could no longer read books or a newspaper, Clive, it turned out,
could still read music.
"Music is part of Clive's procedural memory, like walking or riding
a bike," explains New York neurologist Oliver Sacks, author of the
bestseller Awakenings.
"While he was playing music, he seemed normal," says Deborah. "The
moment he stopped, he became lost again."
