We’ll never really know what happened to my dad. He went into the hospital to have a fairly simple operation. Doctors were going to insert a shunt into his brain to drain fluid building up behind scar tissue left from a World War II brain injury. Shunt insertions are considered quite safe and effective.

Whether the failure was caused by Dad’s age, excessive scar tissue, a surgeon who had a bad day, the anesthetic or the trauma of hospitalization will ever be a mystery, but Dad as we knew him disappeared and we brought home a man with severe dementia. He was to live in that world of dementia for a decade, before he died.

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