Great read from the Atlantic
Hershfield suffered a grand mal seizure—the type most people imagine when they think about seizures. He was driven to the emergency room, thrashing and writhing like a 6-feet-4-inch fish pulled out of the water. Concerned doctors at the UCLA Medical Center rushed him into an MRI machine, and, this being the late 1980s, wondered whether he might have pricked himself with a needle, and contracted AIDS. Instead, the scan revealed that his blackouts where actually a swarm of small strokes, and his illness was diagnosed as antiphospholipid syndrome. Hershfield’s immune system was mistakenly creating antibodies that made his blood more likely to clot. Those clots, if they entered his bloodstream and brain, could kill him at any moment.
Doctors prescribed blood-thinning medication and forced Hershfield to quit driving, but he was still fit to practice medicine. Like many survivors of stroke, his speech became slurred and he sometimes stuttered. His personality also seemed to change. He suddenly became obsessed with reading and writing poetry. Soon, Hershfield’s friends noticed another unusual side effect: He couldn’t stop speaking in rhyme. He finished everyday sentences with rhyming couplets, like “Now I have to ride the bus, it’s enough to make me cuss.” And curiously, whenever he rhymed, his speech impediments disappeared.
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“He was tight,” the rapper Myka 9 told me, while he smoked in an alleyway before a performance in Culver City. “He had a little bit of an angular approach. He had flows, he had good lines that were thought out, I remember a couple punchlines that came off pretty cool.” Myka 9 recalled socializing with Hershfield at house parties in South Central, and described him as “a cult personality in his own right.”
At home, the doctor’s wife was worried. “I don’t understand why he goes to that area,” Michiko told me. Her husband was too generous and trusting, she added. “I bought him nice clothes, Italian-made suits, a couple times he came back with dirty clothes, he’d given the nice suit to somebody else.” With his designer threads and prescription pad, Hershfield was a mugger’s dream.
“I keep telling him it’s dangerous,” Michiko told me. Hershfield insisted he was safe. These people were his friends, he said.
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Much more at the link.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/01/doctor-rapp/579634/
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