President Biden’s troubling condition reminds me of my grandmother’s own cognitive decline in which she didn’t make sense at times, called my dad and me by different names and, worse, had stopped seeing her regular doctor for a quack, who had put her on some new medication that turned out to be nothing more than Geritol.
In the early 1950s, two traumatic but separate events happened in my family.
My uncle, Army Corporal Isaac Martinez, was reported missing an action in Korea, and soon the family received confirmation that he was a prisoner of war in a Korean concentration camp.
Around the same time, his mother — my grandmother Ysidra Martinez Castro, known lovingly as Doña Ysidra — began to exhibit symptoms of severe cognitive decline, accompanied by fits of shaking that her doctor attributed to a nervous condition brought on by news of Isaac’s capture and incarceration.
My dad was still in mourning over my grandfather’s recent death, even as mom gave birth to my younger sister.
So it was a stressful time in our household and I suppose in our entire extended family there in Texas.
Care of my grandmother was left in the hands of my Uncle Frank, who was still a teenager and was trying to do his best.
He was taking her to her doctor on a weekly basis and keeping dad and my Uncle Angel updated, and they in turn kept their siblings living in Houston and Fort Worth apprised of Doña Ysidra’s condition.
It didn’t take a specialist to understand that she wasn’t well and was getting worse.
I would often go visit her with dad, and it was obvious that something serious had happened to her.
Her face had almost a cartoonish appearance that she hadn’t had prior to her illness. Her body shook uncontrollably most of the time.
Half of what Doña Ysidra said sounded incoherent at best and like childish gibberish at worst. Both my dad and I share the same first name. I’m a junior. But she would call my dad Pancho, which was actually her son Frank’s nickname, and she called me Isaac, apparently confusing me with her older son who was the POW in Korea.
My dad began to suspect that her doctor didn’t know what he was talking about and soon got a surprise. It turned out that Doña Ysidra had stopped going to our family doctor and had begun seeing a new one there in the North 2nd Street barrio of Waco, Texas.
So dad rushed her to Providence Hospital, where she was admitted and where a series of tests over the next few days determined that Doña Ysidra was suffering from Parkinson’s disease.
Then the story got even worse.
The new doctor she had been seeing for a good while wasn’t really a licensed physician. He was some quack there in the barrio who practiced folk medicine and had a great scam going in that largely poor Mexican American and immigrant community.
Add to that the stunning revelation that the medication that he had given Doña Ysidra was nothing more than over-the-counter Geritol bottled into a generic bottle with no labeling.
Dad was furious. He managed the laundry facilities at the Veterans Hospital there in Waco, and an official from the VA accompanied him to file a police complaint.
Within days, the quack who had been treating Doña Ysidra — known to his patients only as “Dr. Arias” — closed his office and disappeared.
My grandmother continued to suffer from Parkinson’s disease for the remainder of her life.
On some days she could have conversations in which she appeared somewhat lucid. But she was never even remotely the same and under nursing care until her death.
Today, I can’t help but be reminded of this tragic medical fiasco.
And I can’t help wondering if, like Dr. Arias, the people near the president with vested interests of their own aren’t similarly gambling with his health and the nation’s, using some quacky generic tonic of their own.
TONY CASTRO, the former award-winning Los Angeles columnist and author of “Chicano Power” (E.P. Dutton, 1974), is a national political writer with LAMonthly.org. “Chicano Power” will be republished in a 50th anniversary edition in late 2024. He can be reached at tony@tonycastro.com. Website: https//tonycastro.com
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Most of the Castro clan, circa 1945. My dad was still hospitalized from wounds at Bastogne. From left: Connie, Angel, Josie, Jose Angel, Ysidra, Guadalupe, Pauline, Nellie. Bottom: Isaac and Frank. From ‘The Prince of South Waco: American Dreams and Great Expectations,’ Tony Castro (Prodigal Books, 2013)
