A Tattoo on my Brain, by Dr. Daniel Gibbs

I am a 70-year-old retired neurologist, and I have early-stage Alzheimer’s disease. In retrospect, my first symptom of Alzheimer’s occurred when I was 57 and realized that my sense of smell was not as sharp as it once had been. I chalked this up to normal aging, but about a year later I started to have strange, illusory odors, like the smell of baking bread mixed with perfume. They would come out of nowhere and last a few minutes to an hour or so.