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Page: << Prev | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | Next >> Heading towards their 10-year anniversary, everything seemed to be going according to plan. But shortly after Jim turned 34, Michelle started to notice some slight changes in his behavior.
"I saw that he was experiencing some problems with his memory -- forgetting appointments, that kind of thing," she remembers. "And he was coming home from work increasingly tired. But I just attributed it to the job. . . I wasn't alarmed."
"But," she sighs. "A lot of the things he was really experiencing he kept hidden from me. He didn't share it all. And I do believe it's because he was afraid."
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"I started to forget a lot of things," Jim now admits. "I pushed it off as business and stress, but it was weird and frustrating. I mean, you know, I would forget where I parked my car."
"Jim had started to forget about work meetings," Michelle adds. "He forgot to turn people's time cards in. Forgot where his tools were. And this was just not Jim at all."
Then, at 35, Jim was hospitalized. "He was very ill," Michelle remembers. "He had a serious flu, and an inner ear infection. And dizziness. And his vision was affected. He didn't recover from the dizziness, and he was not able to see clearly, so there was something neurologically going on with his brain. So they did an MRI, and they discovered that he had a small stroke. Then I was alarmed."
Though he had to stop working immediately, it would take another full year of spinal taps, MRIs, CT scans, neurology exams and memory tests before the Muellers would get a final diagnosis at Rush Medical Center in Chicago.
"I said, 'What do you mean dementia?!'," Michelle recalls with horror.
Searching for a way to explain the experience, Michelle starts by describing the healthy man she married.
"What really drew me to Jim," she says, "is that he enjoyed life so much. He's a lively person, who loves to play around... So when he started to lose some of his motor skills, when his legs first gave out, I thought he was kidding. And I would say, 'Come on, Jim! Stop playing! And he said, 'I'm not playing around.' And it was like a knife through my heart."
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