Seeking a cause, any cause

Before Mom had a definite diagnosis of FLD, were looked for all sorts of reasons to explain her increasingly bizarre behavior. I didn't know about FTD, for one, so we wrote off dementia right away; Mom seemed far too young for it.

I had read a while back that many supplements are contamined with substances like lead, as well as having quality issues like not containing promised amount of the promised nutrient. And for a while I was convinced that Mom had gotten manganese poisoning, which has been linked to Parkinson's, from the huge amounts of glucosamine supplements she took to keep her joints healthy -- unecessarily, as it turned out; she didn't have any more or less joint pain after she stopped taking the pills.



Maybe it was some heavy metal in the well water, which my father stubbornly refused to have tested for decades until they put the house on the market and -- surprise! -- arsenic. Weirder things have happened; apparently some poor folks who were happily living near a scenic lake in New Hampshire were sitting ducks for ALS thanks to some innocent-looking bacteria.

For a while I thought it might be all the bisphenol A lining her diet soda cans; she could consume three-four cans a day. It has caused problems with neural development in animal studies, after all.

Then, because so many of her symptoms suggested problems with hearing or loss of balance, we thought it might be a vascular issue. That turned out not to be the case, either. Drinking? She was long known for her hollow leg, but rarely got blind drunk (or even drank regularly, except for the period right after Grandmother died). Heredity? Nope, no other victims in the family, and I sure hope there won't be.

The illness has been, and remains, a reminder of the complete randomness of life, and how from day to day, from moment to moment, nothing stays the same.