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calling his colleagues in Paris, asking them to try to help locate him and to see if anyone traveling back to the United States might be persuaded to assist him. I was terrified by the thought of his getting rerouted and lost. I was also afraid to fly to Paris to retrieve him myself, fearing he might escape me too. Colleagues eventually tracked him down, but his return ticket was changed five times. Harvey refused to believe that he needed to go home right away.
    While I continued to try to arrange Harvey’s flight back, I made contact with a female colleague who had been at the London meeting. It was summertime, and we sat outside a hotel in Bethesda. She told me she was the only scientist that Harvey had allowed to care for him after he locked himself in his room. He had confided that he felt scared and confused.
    Years later, when colleagues at the London meeting recalled the events, they remembered the rapport Harvey had with this scientist. They speculated that perhaps Harvey connected with her because it was her first time attending the meeting. He did not feel as embarrassed with her because she had never known him as he was, and therefore could not judge how much he had changed. I could not help but note that she was very attractive and had also been the only woman at the London meeting. The intimacy of the episodes she described made me wonder in a brief, jealous moment if they were somehow linked romantically. But then the reality of Harvey’s condition sank in. This was not romantic at all; she was genuinely distraught to see a colleague unravel. I frantically wrote down the details she described and shared my frustration that similar symptoms in the past had still not resulted in a diagnosis. I took her card and asked if Harvey’s next round of doctors might contact her directly. Perhaps if they heard the story from another doctor, they might believe that Harvey was on a slow, but irreversible course of cognitive decline.
    I finally succeeded in arranging for a Paris research colleague en route to Los Angeles to accompany Harvey to Charles de Gaulle Airport, help him navigate through customs, and make certain he was on the right flight home. Harvey was supposed to arrive in Dulles around 2:40 P . M . Sunday. Arriving at the airport three hours early, I gained the sympathy of an airport police officer who had suffered head trauma and short-term memory loss. He escorted me in to explain the circumstances to the immigration officials. When I pointed out my husband in the crowd, Harvey didn’t look like someone who was impaired or even confused. He was well dressed, his appearance neat. I felt the sympathy my story had garnered starting to slip away. I wondered if they suspected that I concocted the story to earn special treatment. Once back, Harvey was like a recalcitrant little boy who knows he has done something mischievous but doesn’t realize for a moment that he could have been seriously harmed.
    The trip to London, coming so close on the heels of his breakdown during the lecture to the doctors, was the final straw for me. I knew that we had to get Harvey a real diagnosis. Even though it was Sunday, I drove Harvey directly from the airport to the office of a physician and close personal friend to run a battery of tests and persuade Harvey that he had to go to the hospital for further brain scans.
    The next day we went to see a brain trauma expert at the National Naval Medical Center right outside of Washington, D.C. There, my husband, Captain Harvey R. Gralnick could have his medical records from his thirty-one years in the public health service matched with his most recent X-rays. I was desperate to identify why Harvey today was not the man I married. Some may wonder why I didn’t do this at the very beginning. The answer: any results from these tests would immediately go into his work record and be reported to his superiors. Why put his career in jeopardy if it was something that could