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My Alzheimer’s Story
My name is Lisa Burr. I am a family nurse practitioner, and have been for nearly three decades. I grew up in California, the “Sunshine State.”
In the 1960s, my dad, a military test pilot, was the first astronaut with NASA’s Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) program, which pioneered crewed space stations as reconnaissance satellites. My mother was a beautiful model.
The Birthday Party
Forty years ago, I experienced a miracle—the first of many in my nursing career. I was about six months into my first nursing job, in the neonatal ICU at Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago. It was there that I met baby Jonathon, and it was his mother who made me a true believer.
Jonathon had come to us with severe kidney disease. He looked sickly: His skin was very pale—translucent even. He acted like a healthy infant, though, and as he got older, he actually smiled at us. But despite the doctors’ best efforts, his kidneys were barely functioning.
Role Reversal
The year 2020 was a lot of things for a lot of people. Chaotic, exhausting, heartbreaking, hopeful. It was a year in which my immense privilege—as a healthy, educated white woman—protected me from much of the pain born by others.
And while it was many of those things (especially chaotic) for me, it was also the year I started medical school. The year I moved from LA to Austin, driving across California, Utah and Texas in the process. The year I read fifty-four fiction books to escape the monotony of lockdown.
And it was the year my dad died.
First Code Blue
When I started medical school, I kept hearing about “firsts.” The first time in the OR, the first delivery of a baby, the first death of a patient.
In a profession that is so intricately intertwined with the ultimate highs and lows of human life, there are a number of experiences that inevitably go on to leave permanent marks on the mind. I was always told that my first code blue would be one of these moments—and indeed, the night I first saw a code is one that will be forever engraved in my memory.
Due Date
It’s the bright orange color that catches my eye. Nestled in a box under my home office desk, alongside unused breast pads and pumping supplies left over from the birth of my first daughter.
My first, because there should have been a second. A girl.
What Remains From the Pediatric Ward
I wake up in a hospital isolation room, where everything smells weird. It’s 1967 in Galway City, Ireland, and I’m four years old.
The worst smell is the antiseptic—a word I don’t know yet. The second smell is the crayons and newssheet coloring books on the nightstand. Christmas is gone, so how can these be for me?
The family lore would say that I spent nearly seven weeks in that hospital. That’s forty-nine days or 1,176 hours’ worth of temperature checks, dosages, white-coated doctors.
Into the Unknown
On March 17, 2015, I was diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer. Initially it was thought that I would need only a lumpectomy and radiation, but the biopsy changed everything.
The pathology report said that the tumor was HER2-positive and estrogen/progesterone positive. The HER2 protein makes the cancer more aggressive, so I would need, in addition to surgery and radiation, eighteen weeks of standard chemotherapy, a year of two other infused drugs and a hormone-blocking oral drug.
Still, the cancer was stage 1a with a decent prognosis, according to my oncologist, who said, “The good news here is that we have treatments for every part of your cancer. You are lucky.”
Hope Is the Thing With Feathers
When my son Locklin was a month old, he became very sick. He started throwing up and kept throwing up and ended up in the hospital.
The hospital ID band on my son’s wrist fit on my ring finger. I could cradle my son’s whole body in my hands.
The oxygen meter clamped to his finger was the size of a paper clip. It glowed red and blue, the colors of emergency, like tiny police lights flashing against bleached hospital sheets.
What Little Separates Us
Among the handful of patients who visited the emergency department one night in June with abdominal pain, rashes or fevers, I especially remember Michelle. She was a woman in her late twenties, eight weeks pregnant with her second child. I was a second-year resident, and she had come for help with something I’d already encountered over a dozen times in my training.
“I think I might be having a miscarriage,” she said. She stopped herself, then looked at me as if to gauge my reaction.