TV's Senility-Be-Gone Plot: Readers Respond

In the last post, I reported on a neurologist's thoughts about whether a severely senile Alzheimer's patient could temporarily recover and become lucid. (This was a plotline on "Grey's Anatomy.")

A few readers responded to an earlier post about this topic.

Sherri had a pretty neat story:

... my Grandmother had the kind of Alzheimer's that made it so she couldn't communicate. She could get a few words out, then either stuttered or lost track of where she was.

She was out of the hospital room during my Grandfather's death, but we brought her in to see him after the nurses had left...

I stayed with my Grandmother at the Alzheimer's unit in the nursing home that night. For about two hours, she told me all sorts of stories from the past -- in with a lot of detail, and even people's names (the ability to use/remember people's names was one of her first things to go with Alzheimer's).

We went to sleep, and her lucidity wasn't around the next morning. I had a hard time convincing my family members that she was able to tell those stories. When they finally believed me, we guessed that it was the emotional trauma of seeing her husband's lifeless body that temporarily 'jarred' something in her brain.

Jeffrey, meanwhile, dropped by the TV show's official blog:

"The concept of someone with this disease having a lucid day is real.
The disease varies for everyone, but experts we talked to said thatpatients have bad days and good days and then sometimes they have greatdays where it seems like they are their old selves."