Part 2

‘That’s it!  I can’t take any more of this shit!”.   Betty had to do something about this.  She couldn’t have her mother walking around half naked in public, though her mother didn’t seem to mind at all.  Helen was happily demented.

Helen had always been a sweet and gentle person.  Always had a kind word to say.  She kept in touch with numerous family and friends.  Everyone liked or loved her.  But things had changed.

Helen was older now, so her failing memory was blamed on old age at first.  But things got worse fast.  She kept repeating her sentences, and losing things.  She became confused.  She didn’t know what day it was, or what month, or year.  She thought her dear husband, who had died long ago, was still alive.  She seemed to be living in the past.  She stopped taking care of herself.  She didn’t bathe or brush her teeth unless she was reminded.  She was forgetting to eat.  And now she was wandering outside the house, getting lost.  This last time, she was wandering around half naked!

So Betty took a day off work to take her mother to see the doctor.  Another old person with dementia, no big deal, the doctor thought, though he was a little surprised by Helen’s spastic movements and a foot drop.  He ordered the routine tests for dementia, which include blood tests and a CT scan of the brain.

The blood tests were mostly okay.  All except the test for syphilis.

“Syphilis!”  Betty was first shocked, then suspicious, then angry.  That was the dumbest thing she had ever heard.  She wondered about this doctor’s credentials as she didn’t know him at all.  Was he some sort of quack idiot?  What the hell was he thinking!  Her mother had “syphilis?!?”  Absurd!

The doctor explained that syphilis can lie dormant for many years, gradually damaging the brain until the day comes when symptoms start to show.  Symptoms can include dementia, and the spasticity and foot drop that he had noted. He mentioned that the screening blood test for syphilis had been confirmed by a more specific test.  There was no doubt about the diagnosis.

So Helen was treated with Penicillin, probably killing all the syphilis germs in her body.  Her mind improved a little, but not much.  She was eventually placed in a nursing home where she could be reminded to eat, and to put her clothes back on.

Part 1

This part of the story is lost forever, as the memories were digested by the syphilis germs when they ate her brain.

Helen’s dear husband had served in the Pacific in WW2.  Unknown to her, he had celebrated the end of the war with a fine oriental chick.  He came home with a sore on the shaft of his penis that looked like this:

He celebrated again with his wife, sharing his love and his syphilis with her.  She felt ill for the next month or so, but didn’t notice her own chancre sore as it was internal.  She did notice the rash that appeared on her back some time later, but she treated it with a moisturizing cream and it eventually went away on its own.

But the little bugger was in there, gradually eating her vital organs.  Here is the crazy spirochete, Treponema pallidum:

And here it is eating her brain:

And here are the left overs:

No reason to be too upset.  She lived a nice long life, and everyone remembers her well.  In the end, she was unaware of just about everything.  She didn’t notice the poor care at the nursing home.  She was oblivious, but happy!