Beside the Mountain: Finding Strength and Courage Through My Father's Early Onset Alzheimer's Disease

It all started with the numbers. Giovanni (John) Silvestri, an electrical engineer, could no longer add and subtract without dancing his pen around the numbers. And then gradually, he started forgetting words. Stefania’s mother, Enida, was the first to suspect that John had Alzheimer’s disease. He was just forty-eight years old when he and his wife made their first appointment with a neurologist. The MRI results showed that John had the brain of an eighty-five-year-old man. Stefania’s fathe...