Steps Restored: Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus Stories

Inside this volume

Fifty first-person accounts describe normal pressure hydrocephalus, mostly in later life and often told by or alongside a husband, wife, son or granddaughter. Many were first treated for something else: Parkinson's tablets that did nothing for two years, eight months believing it was Alzheimer's, a year and a half of depression treatment, a care home form that said dementia. Others were found after a fall on an icy step, a brain bleed or a scaffolding accident. Contributors include a primary school teacher, a machinist, a bus driver, a creamery man, a librarian, a minister, a fisherman and a cloth seller at a Lagos market, from Leeds and Cleveland to Zagreb, Santiago and Durban. Writers describe tap tests, four-day drain trials, insurance refusals and appeals, eight months waiting for a bed, shunts with adjustable dials, and an MRI that changed a valve setting. Daily life returns in small measures: fourteen stairs, a walk to the letterbox, Sunday lunch, the pool, a dance at a granddaughter's wedding, giving up the car keys. Not every story goes that way. Some had a tap test that said no, a shunt revised twice, an infection, a failure after four years or only small gains, and one man of eighty explains why he turned the shunt down.

Who it's for

For anyone whose walking, memory or bladder has changed and been put down to age, and for the husbands, wives, sons and daughters who keep asking for one more look.

Format · Instant download · PDF & EPUB · Fifty first-person accounts · PDF: 261 pages

A collection of personal testimony, offered as companion reading — not medical advice.

• 50 single-author testimonies from real people
• A short, plain-language introduction to the topic
• Editor's note, contents page, and curated resource list
• Professional interior typesetting and an original cover

Every purchase includes a print-quality PDF (best for desktop, tablet, and printing) and a reflowable EPUB (best for Kindle, Apple Books, Kobo, and phones). Files are DRM-free. You can download both instantly from the order-confirmation screen, and we email them to your inbox as well, so your books are always within reach.