At the show's recording, it would have been almost a year since my father passed. As I have talked at length about Charles S. Corprew Jr. and what he meant to me, what his light meant to me. And then I think about this, and I probably never said this on the show, Revolutionaries, that in my introspection about my relationship with my father, I realized that he was an only child and I wasn't only a child.
And once we broke the barriers of being father and son, it was always there, that auspices of being father and son was always there. But I realized that my father and I were not only fraternal brothers but also brothers. We laughed and joked and played ever since I was a child. And it was the roughhousing and joking and laughter and going to basketball games and baseball games and track meets and everything. The reality of that was that my father was my brother and we enjoyed that camaraderie. But if you remember as I've talked so much at length here on this show that the last five years of his life, his light was stolen, and that I became his caregiver because of Alzheimer's and dementia. And so I think it is very, very important as I think about who listens to the show and think about being a caregiver. How do we think about Alzheimer's and dementia?
How do we even take care of ourselves as we develop? How do we move through those spaces so we can not lose the last five years of our lives? And I began to think about who I want on the show to talk with me about this work, his work, and how we mitigate and deter some of the things that really exacerbate Alzheimer's. And I began to look and I found this wonderful, wonderful brother who not only is a JMU grad like myself but is one of the foremost gerontologists in the country. Dr. Robert Turner.
Dr. Robert W. Turner II is an assistant professor in the Department of Clinical Research and Leadership with a secondary appointment in the Department of Neurology at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences. He is a health disparities researcher with ethnographic and mixed methods training, and you know that I love that because my dissertation was both. His current National Institute on Aging funded the K-1 Award examined psychosocial and neurocognitive risk and protective factors and accelerated cognitive aging. and mild traumatic brain injury among former NCAA Division I and former NFL athletes. His book, Not For Long, The Life and Career of the NFL Athlete is out for anyone to purchase, to really, really understand what's going on when it comes to brain health for our athletes.
What is Alzheimer's
Well, I'm going to do it in the simplest form. In the simplest form, we have brain cells and neurons, and they communicate with one another. And I'm learning in a lot of different ways. The human body is just the most amazing thing. But your brain communicates with your arm or your hand and tells it to move. Well, it has to have clear pathways
the electronic pulses, and the messaging to be sent that way. And so what you have is when you wind up having these damaged brain cells of which you have plaques and you have tangles. And so that winds up happening with the tangles is they glob up together and then they break off and then so, therefore, they cannot, the pathways are just broken.
You know, you have clogged arteries from plaque in your arteries, right? And the messaging can't flow, the blood can't flow through that. And so essentially what winds up happening, and it's, and most people think it's all about losing your memory. It's not about just that at all. It's your ability to have, your memory, your executive functioning, your ability to control, you know, your body.
For the visually inclined, please check out the podcast on YouTube - The What's Your Revolution? Show with Dr. Charles Corprew
