26 ms·

What Happened to Lee

1298 points by jgrahamc 7y ago

zellyn 7y ago
My father-in-law has FTD. I was just a few paragraphs into the article before I started wondering. Search the NYTimes for "Frontotemporal Dementia", and you'll find several stories, all similar :-(
shrimp_emoji 7y ago
TL;DR: frontotemporal dementia >Holloway received his death sentence with pure calm. While his family cried beside him, he complimented a doctor for having a nice wedding ring. xD
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
sourabhforu 7y ago
Tragic. Hope you live your life to the fullest Lee. And thanks for making the web safer.
kick 7y ago
This is horrifying. Conversations soon became impossible. Lee started chattering in repetitive, unceasing loops. He would tell Kristin: “We met at Cloudflare. We got engaged in Rome. We got married in Maui, Hawaii.” He repeated it hundreds of times a day. Then the loops got shorter, more cryptic. He spoke fewer sentences, instead muttering sequences of numbers or letters. At the same time, given the flashes of lucidity pointed out in this article, you have to wonder if others talking about his condition so much might make him feel like a walking corpse when those hit.
- eastdakota 7y ago
  It was incredibly sad to watch. The last time I saw him while he was still speaking — he is still alive but doesn’t speak or seem to recognize me anymore — he would repeat the same questions from the same conversation in the same order on a 30-minute loop. Over and over. I’ve really struggled to wrap my mind around his condition. I don’t think it’s frustrating for him. He seems to have lost the emotion to be frustrated. I think we all have a sense of Alzheimer’s because we’ve all forgotten something. This isn’t that. Lee’s memory, if anything, seemed to improve and he’d bring up little details from when we first worked together I’d long since forgotten. What seemed to go away was his ability to process those memories into something more. It’s hard to imagine losing the ability to imagine. And, as his friend and colleague, it was incredibly frustrating when we just thought he was checked out. And then devastating when we learned all this time he’d actually had a disease. I do wonder if some of his genius came from his ability to shut down some of the other noise in his life. And if the disease, for some time before it became debilitating, was almost a superpower. I’ve never met an engineer like him. I miss him every day.
  - beckynot 7y ago
    That’s what I wondered too. If it was all part of a particular kind of brain. He reminded me too much of my ex-husband, also a high level programmer, and his sleep habits and growing apathy and irritability while we were together (though he might point to me as the cause). Not to say my software engineer ex has the same condition, but maybe he has a touch of it. So many of us have just a touch of something that is clinical in someone else.
  - jamestimmins 7y ago
    I'm sorry for the loss you and his other friends/loved ones have experienced. Do you feel like the article was accurate and fair to the people involved?
    - eastdakota 7y ago
      Yes. Very. It was important to me and Michelle that it be a tribute to Lee’s genius and contribution to Cloudflare. We spent a long time looking for the right reporter and publication. Wired seemed appropriate given Lee’s love of technology. And Sandra was a total class act. We opened up fully to her, spending nearly a year letting her get to know us. Lee’s family was incredibly giving of their time. It takes a really talented and empathetic writer to have people feel safe and to open up to such a personal story like they did. I got the advance copy of the article last night and it’s been an emotional 12 hours reliving a lot of the last 18 years I’ve known Lee. But I’m happy we helped create something Lee’s two sons will be able to read and see a little bit of what an incredible person their dad was.
      - jamestimmins 7y ago
        Thanks for sharing that. It sounds like first and foremost, everyone wanted to do right by their friend. That alone is touching, and I'm glad that the final article was the tribute you all hoped for. It was heartbreaking and beautiful, and was an honor to be let into the lives of everyone involved. My prayer is that while this time is emotional, the process and article also provide a degree of healing as well. Again, thanks for sharing.
- thephyber 7y ago
  His old college roommate met up with Lee when the "looping thoughts" symptoms first started to present and the roommate (who had been overseas for 10 years before that) commented that he almost called 9/11 because he thought Lee was having some sort of a stroke. Lee's short term memory seemed to wipe and he restarted the same conversation 3 times in an hour lunch (this symptom is pretty common in my experience with other dementia sufferers). I met back with them a year later and he was very dependent upon his cell phone to look up people on Facebook, places on Google Maps, movies on IMDB, etc. (basically all nouns) in real time during the conversation to fill in the gaps in his memories. I lived with him for maybe 5-6 years and he had to look up my Facebook profile and pictures to try to pick up on any nostalgia that might catalyze a memory. I suspect there is an underlying current of frustration, but probably not a high level cognitive realization (at least not a sudden one) that his mind is degrading.
jc01480 7y ago
The idea that we’d eventually come to a day when we can no longer see ourselves. That is hell for most, a gift to few.
vikramkr 7y ago
It's a tragic story. In some way, he'll live on in his contributions to a better and safer internet, for whatever that's worth. Thank you for your contributions, Lee, and I hope you have the best life you can.
mensetmanusman 7y ago
I come from a family of extremely gifted visual thinkers (PhDs from MIT/Stanford/etc) and in the last year one of us had a heart issue that coincided with a month long bout of psychosis, where dream-like real visualizations were overlaid onto the real world. I’m convinced that the genetic effects that provide us with extreme visualization and problem solving skills are related to this particular failure mode, where schizophrenia is also common in the family tree.
- bobblywobbles 7y ago
  You are likely right, this is a fascinating insight.
- meowface 7y ago
  Yes, evolution often seems to result in these sorts of trade-offs. It seems pretty rare to get a genetic "free ride", so to speak. It's like different ways of balancing the same equation using the same resources.
- basch 7y ago
  The ability to make strong abstract connections transforming into misassociations? I think about this one a lot, how easy it is for pattern recognition to misfire and synthesize conclusions and connections that are partially rational and correct, but with one bad piece of input data skewing them into fantasy. Sometimes the conclusion may be right, but its magnitude, impact, or applicability are grossly overestimated. Part of what makes such gifted people is the ability to imagine, hypothesize, and use hypotheticals. This giftedness often coincides with the ability to make many parallel what if thoughts and identify the most probable. At some point, hypotheticals morph into faith and what was once a thought experiment becomes belief. What ifs break down into belief "this is actually happening, this is reality." It becomes its own compounding feedback loop, as faulty conclusions layer on top of each other over time.
  - caleb-allen 7y ago
    My father is an entrepreneur, with multiple successful companies under his belt. He's got a knack for seeing opportunities others don't, synthesizing those connections. Anybody who's had a conversation with him can tell you that. His younger brother, my uncle, was diagnosed with schizophrenia at age 20 after becoming severely erratic while away from home on an LDS mission. The diagnosis devastated their family, and has been followed by decades of difficult treatment and heartbreak. What is it about my uncle that pushed him over the edge? Environment? Genetics? Pure chance? I wish I could know. My dad says that there's not much left of him except for a few moments here and there. My dad had a big family, and he's said that his younger brother always showed the most promise, growing up. Smart, charming, super friendly. 30 years on he continues to greet everybody with a smile and hug, even if he doesn't know them! It's sobering to see it in my own family, and it keeps thoughts like the one you articulated so well in the back of my mind constantly.
dgellow 7y ago
Incredibly saddening to read. I wish Lee, Kristin, and their son all the best.
Igelau 7y ago
And people don't understand why I fell into a two week existential crisis after I saw 'The Notebook' > many of the neurologists who study it believe it is underdiagnosed This is a tragedy. Of course it's underdiagnosed. Everyone around you would just think you're an asshole. In the article, it sounds like so many people fought right and were patient and loving. How many cases do we never hear about, get fought abusively, and push the last shattered remnants of a person into drugs, suicide, etc.
- mh- 7y ago
  > And people don't understand why I fell into a two week existential crisis after I saw 'The Notebook' Thank you. I watched that movie with my wife 15 years ago, now, and it remains the scariest, saddest movie I've ever seen.
hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
Perhaps this is too philosophical, but for anyone who has dealt with someone with a long decline into dementia, it's very difficult for me to understand a belief in God after going through that (I certainly understand some people have the exact opposite reaction, so I'm in no way saying this belief is correct). It's just difficult for me to envision a crueler God if that is indeed the case. A person who has died long before their body gives way, only to be a constant burden, with virtually no joy, and a constant reminder that your loved one is dead, yet still here. In the worst cases I say unreservedly that it is a huge relief when the person's body finally joins their mind in death.
- Igelau 7y ago
  I'm sorry you had to watch that happen to someone on the long decline. Occuring alongside a number of other conditions, my mother's dementia only ran a brief course before she passed away. That brief window was terrifying and heartbreaking. I understand some of the relief you mentioned. It felt like a war had ended.
- mensetmanusman 7y ago
  Great question. Lots of history on this topic, here is an interesting overview in regards to the Lisbon Earthquake[1]: https://youtu.be/vx8ZMkWL8hw https://youtu.be/vx8ZMkWL8hw [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1755_Lisbon_earthquake https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1755_Lisbon_earthquake
- hwc 7y ago
  If God exists, they are cruel and uncaring.
  - adamc 7y ago
    Unproven. Maybe just not micro-managing. Maybe they enable life, and watch to see where it goes.
  - claudiawerner 7y ago
    This is known as the "problem of evil" and has intrigued philosophers and theologians for centuries. There are quite a few responses to the problem[0] though it's up to you to decide if they're convincing or not. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_evil#Responses,_defences_and_theodicies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_evil#Responses,_def...
antonzabirko 7y ago
I hope they tried supplementing with herbals like Lions mane or anything that stimulates nervous cell growth. Also he lost a lot more than his self here. Terrible condition.
throwaway29303 7y ago
I just finished reading this and I'm weeping. I'm so sorry.
meowface 7y ago
So sad and bleak to read. Are there any remotely promising paths to treating or preventing neurodegenerative diseases like these in the future? Or at least to slow down the progression? Are there any experimental drugs? Will we likely just need to wait until targeted in vivo genetic engineering is understood and mastered? I know those are broad questions, but suffering from something like dementia, Alzheimer's, or Parkinson's, or having a loved one suffer from it, seems like one of the cruelest fates imaginable. The helplessness of the doctor saying there's basically nothing you can do other than to try to eat healthy and exercise... If I was given such a diagnosis while still lucid, I think I would want to try every experimental treatment available, if any exist. I'd accept almost any risk over that horrifying, inevitable outcome.
- antonzabirko 7y ago
  A cocktail of neural herbals, exercise, meditation, extra therapy - I hope he got all these early on.
  - meowface 7y ago
    That's basically what the doctor said, though. I personally doubt those slow it down very much. I also think the science is still so poorly understood that certain supplements or foods could potentially even worsen things. (Just to throw out a totally made up scenario, maybe some compound found in some plant, and its metabolites, cause a small increase in monoamine release. This may be perceived as a mild stimulating effect in healthy people, but could hypothetically potentially speed up some feedback loop which leads to faster neuron death in people with certain neurodegenerative diseases.) Exercise and healthy eating is probably still a good idea, but basically it just seems like hoping for the best without real knowledge of what may or may not be helping or hurting.
noir_lord 7y ago
I have a chronic neurological condition that may eventually affect my ability to walk (though it is stable and the current prognosis is good and the drugs work for the pain) but when I was going through the process of finding out what it was and how bad it was the one question at the front of my mind was "will this affect me mentally?", I could live with the thought I may one day need a wheelchair but I don't think I could live knowing I was going to lose my essential sense of self. This is a beautifully written article but it hit me pretty hard, I can understand the terror having faced it for a few months, I think if I got a diagnosis of dementia I'd head to Switzerland at the point where I still could. My heart goes out to Lee and his family.
- bitwize 7y ago
  Losing your mental faculties is a profound fear especially for smart people. After falling down stairs in the early stages of his ALS, Stephen Hawking went to his local Mensa center to take an IQ test to make sure he was still "all there" and smart enough to do physics.
kemonocode 7y ago
Neurodegenerative diseases scare me out of my wits. All I can hope is whatever takes me is swift, or at the very least leaves my mind intact. Regardless of who you were and how rich and famous you might be, all what matters is what you'll be.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
daenz 7y ago
The question that occurs to me is: if you knew that was in your future, would you spend your last 10 good years toiling at a startup?
- djohnston 7y ago
  10 good years is a long time. As a founder I would guess he truly believed in the mission, at least before FTD took hold, and I think that kind of pursuit would be more fulfilling than a 10 year vacation.
- reuben_scratton 7y ago
  Yes. His family are financially secure, thanks to his Cloudflare millions. I could die much more easily knowing my family were safe after I'd gone.
  - libria 7y ago
    That's the answer to "Would you spend your last 10 years securing a guaranteed multi-million dollar payout?" not "Would you work your tail off for a gamble?" Startup != assured success.
    - daenz 7y ago
      I should have been more specific with my hypothetical. I only meant having knowledge of the disease, not of any kind of startup mega-success.
- renewiltord 7y ago
  Yes. It would probably make me do so harder because it’s my life’s work and I have only that much time to do it.
- ratww 7y ago
  He seemed to love his work. I would.
- thebusby 7y ago
billti 7y ago
> The neurologists delivered their verdict: He appeared to have a textbook case of frontotemporal dementia—known by the shorthand FTD Oh man, was that a kick in the guts when I got to that bit. My Dad was diagnosed with that in the past year, (after obviously struggling for a while), and declined rapidly. He had a different variant, and indeed the one thing that DIDN'T change was his personality. In fact, that's what kind of fooled me for a while. He would still trot out his usual bad jokes and regular phrases, but after a while you realize these are almost like reflexes, and often wouldn't really make sense in context. It was interesting to see for Lee how this seemed amplified after heart surgery. My Dad had really bad "post-operative delirium" for about a month after major heart surgery, and while he recovered somewhat, that was definitely the start of his major decline. Sadly, after moving into a care facility in mid-March, within a couple weeks he was in hospital after contracting Covid-19. He passed away on the 4th of this month from it. The only good to come out of all this was that I'd visited him many times over the past couple years and said "goodbye" many times thinking it might be the last time, even if just mentally and not physically, I'd get to see "my Dad", as I knew him. Apparently it is often a genetic disorder that can be hereditary, and you can get tested for the genetic markers. As a coder/manager myself who depends on my mind for work, and enjoys being mentally challenged and active, (and I also have young kids), something like this scares the crap out of me. I'm not sure I want to know if I might have it. For one thing, being in the U.S. healthcare system, if I did have the markers, would that then count as a "pre-existing condition" I'd have to disclose?
- williamscales 7y ago
  I'm so sorry for your loss.
- cryptica 7y ago
  >> It was interesting to see for Lee how this seemed amplified after heart surgery. My Dad had really bad "post-operative delirium" for about a month after major heart surgery, and while he recovered somewhat, that was definitely the start of his major decline. That is a strange coincidence. Could changes in bloodflow have an impact on brain cells?
  - 7y ago
epx 7y ago
Remembered me at the end when HAL-9000 said "My mind is going. I can feel it.". But HAL-9000 at least knew :(
s5300 7y ago
If this story moves you, and you have the means, consider donating to CSF Leak research at Stanford. Cerebrospinal Fluid Leaks are something that can completely mimic a large amount of FTD symptoms, and even in the care of utmost professionals, can be near undetectable - and somehow, treatment can be as beautifully simple as a one and done injection... to a hellish guessing game and years of attempts. As Dr. Ian Carrol of Stanford's research has indicated, they seem to be highly misdiagnosed/undiagnosed as well. I know HN has had posts about CSF Leaks before. I truly believe they're one of the worst things we face in this age that can actually be treated with 100% recovery in some cases. However, for far too many, that really means nothing as they'll be sent to a psych facility, nursing home, or become homeless, and die as a whithered husk of what was once a human before they have the slightest indication of what is actually wrong with them, let alone make their way to one of the few places that truly treat the condition.
- rubicon33 7y ago
  How DOES one get diagnosed for this? Is there a test?
  - s5300 7y ago
    If you have zero external support system and literally no money/income... it's an absolute shitshow, and that's about all I can tell you. Dr. Ian Carroll is arguably the best resource in the world. Starting here is probably a good choice. https://profiles.stanford.edu/ian-carroll https://profiles.stanford.edu/ian-carroll https://www.mdedge.com/neurology/migraineresourcecenter/article/132780/headache-migraine/when-suspect-csf-leak https://www.mdedge.com/neurology/migraineresourcecenter/arti... https://youtu.be/QyvWxobqKrc https://youtu.be/QyvWxobqKrc https://youtu.be/g5lsFIDzazc https://youtu.be/g5lsFIDzazc No idea why I currently can't find a non walled version of the first link. It's important - and general googling would be "when to suspect a CSF Leak Ian Carroll" Secondary to Dr. Carroll Dr. Wouter Schievink at Cedars-Sinai also has good information... He's actually the pioneer of research IIRC. Saved a dude from a diagnosis of dementia and spending the rest of his deluded days in a nursing home. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/02/magazine/why-was-their-brothers-memory-and-behavior-so-strange.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/02/magazine/why-was-their-br... IIRC - in the end, based on decades of patient history, he just opened this guy up as a last resort and nearly missed - but did find the leak. Near full recovery. It seems to be that there are some very high risk groups, like those with connective tissue disorders - specifically, Ehlers Danlos. Also, from Carroll's findings, a lot of people diagnosed with POTS are often misdiagnosed and truly have some small CSF Leak. Ehlers Danlos and POTS often go hand in hand as well...
djohnston 7y ago
devastating to read. any decline into dementia is a tragedy but in your 30's? taupathies suck.
oscribinn 7y ago
The way they describe this disease and his behavior, bending over backwards to keep him alive is just going to draw out the suffering of him, his family, his friends, etc. There's nothing bad on the other side of existence/nonexistence anyway, so why not just mercy kill what's left of the poor guy? It's either a quick and painless death or painful, slow disintegration from here on out.
asdf21 7y ago
IMO this is why brain scans should be more common / part of a normal physical every few years.
garganzol 7y ago
Could it be that Lee's productivity frenzy eventually led to this disease? I tend to practice the same style of getting things done during crunch time. I have the same behavior afterwards. Sometimes I can sleep a few days in a row after making a software release. And yes, taking a vacation with my girlfriend sometimes took the same shape: she was running circles in a new city while I was chilling at the hotel room trying to enjoy a few rare moments of rest. Reading the whole story rang a few bells to me.
- thephyber 7y ago
  Second had information from Lee's doctors suggest that there's a genetic component. From what I remember, he was also born prematurely and spent weeks in a NICU. Also worth noting that the disease didn't ease up after he stopped working, so the suggestion that "working less" might have avoided it is not clear.
dhruvarora013 7y ago
I'm so sorry for your loss. This hit especially close to home because my grandmother has been suffering from degenerative mental disease for the last few years. I don't live in the same country as her anymore and every time I return, it's horrifying to witness just how fast a person loses their sense of "self". I think degenerative mental disease like the one here is especially traumatizing since to most of the world, you're physically/visually still the same person. Also, the characteristics that formed your personality often morph into these harrowing alternations - in the case of my grandma - she was always immensely active and always on her feet. She now cannot sit for more than 30 seconds at a time and attempts to run away from home (with no particular destination in mind). She was (it feels strange to write past tense here) a great cook but now she enters the kitchen and has no idea what she's cooking or what step she is on. It is extremely difficult to keep her mind at ease at all. Her mind is so unable to focus or string thoughts together that she has resolved to loud abject shouting of gibberish (much like a toddler) since she has no idea how to convey what or how she got somewhere. But then for the briefest of moments she has complete lucid clarity and will ask me about my job and life, and offer to cook me my favorite dish. Much like Lee's wife, I don't really know when my grandma's last "real" day was and what my next trip is going to bring sadly. It's a sad and slow torment.
beastman82 7y ago
Oh wired, hijacking my back button. Never change from the horrible thing you are
- onedr0p 7y ago
  Right Click > Open in new tab
thesz 7y ago
I'd like to add to discussion [1] which shows relation between stress and autoimmune disease, [2] (Russian) case study of a Russian businessman who burned out (lost a part of cortex due to autoimmunte disease) and [3] encephalitis provoked by emotional stress. [1] https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/autoimmune-disease-and-stress-is-there-a-link-2018071114230 https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/autoimmune-disease-and-s... [2] https://www.forbes.ru/karera-i-svoy-biznes/392253-kukushechka-poehala-k-chemu-privodit-izlishniy-samokontrol-i-kak-s-nim https://www.forbes.ru/karera-i-svoy-biznes/392253-kukushechk... [3] https://www.shmabstracts.com/abstract/stress-is-the-enemy-a-case-of-anti-nmda-receptor-encephalitis-triggered-by-emotional-stress/ https://www.shmabstracts.com/abstract/stress-is-the-enemy-a-... And he was clearly overworked, by my guess.
- garganzol 7y ago
  It is also known that stress increases white blood cell count [1] which is essentially a mechanism behind autoimmune manifestations. Overwork leads to a stress. No wonder useful body cells can be attacked producing a whole range of resulting diseases. The risk of a heart attack also significantly increases when white blood cell count gets high as their presence fuels inflammatory processes in obstructed blood vessels. Eventually this may lead to a full occlusion which is essentially what heart attack is. [1] https://carrington.edu/blog/researchers-discover-link-mental-stress-physical-health/ https://carrington.edu/blog/researchers-discover-link-mental...
devenson 7y ago
I know someone with this disease as well. The saving grace seems to be that he doesn't seem to notice his own ongoing demise. He was fired from work and divorced from his wife before the diagnosis, so obtaining coverage from work has required lawyers and is still unresolved. His care is expensive. It's such a tragic story because this happened in the prime of life, and like the article said the adverse behaviors were initially thought to be a mid-life crisis.
raincom 7y ago
Late Dr. Oliver Sacks in his book "musicophilia" spent a chapter on Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD). That's chapter 28: "irrepressible: music and temporal lobes".
DeathArrow 7y ago
Although the brain is one of our most important organs it seems we neglect it the most. It seems appropriate to also get a brain check when we do our regular health checks, but most of us don't. We spend lots of money on medical research but tiny amounts on researching brain illnesses. I'm not saying that we should spend less on other medical conditions - that's not such thing as an unimportant disease, but we should do much more towards ameliorating brain diseases.
bvandewalle 7y ago
This is one of the saddest thing I read today and a good reminder that life is always finite.
rurban 7y ago
What they are describing, at least in the first 70% of the story, is typical for a creative developer becoming an admin or maintainer, simply becoming an obnoxious asshole. It's the job, not some illness, mostly.
- weakfish 7y ago
  Bad taste, friend.
jeffrallen 7y ago
Thank you Lee. Happy travels, until the sunset.
peter_d_sherman 7y ago
Excerpt: "At work, Lee was still the star engineer. At the end of the summer of 2014, he took on a project that earned Cloudflare its first bout of internet fame: The company would help websites become encrypted for free. (It was not yet standard for company websites to be encrypted.)" Yes, but, this might have earned him the ire of some Nation-States... Let's remember that Distributed-Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks on a website in one nation (which Cloudflare prevents) might very well have been an early form of content censorship by other Nation-States (China, etc.), although newer forms of this exist... When somebody who once occupied a position of Internet power like Lee Holloway did, dies unexpectedly, allegedly from "natural causes", Demand an immediate and thorough investigation Because future Internet Freedom may be at stake...
rubicon33 7y ago
Terrifying. As a software engineer, shit like this scares me. I've felt like I'm on a steady, slow, decline for the last ~4 years. Is it just burnout? Do I need a new hobby? I used to love programming... Spent 12 hours a day jamming on it. Now, I struggle to keep my mind on a line of code for more than 5 minutes. At what point is it just burnout, or at what point is it something more? That's what's terrifying to me. I imagine that was a challenge for those close to Lee. We just know so little about the human body. Our ability to easily query the state of the body, to assess which functional components are working, and which need help, is dismal. I just hope that Lee, in whatever state he is in, isn't suffering.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- golemiprague 7y ago
  Nah, pretty normal. This job is just not designed to grow with a person, for most people it is an endless loop of learning the same thing again and again in small variations every two years. No wonder it is boring and people get fed up with it.
- 01100011 7y ago
  How old are you? I'm about to hit 45 and have been on that path for about 2 years now. It started with sleep apnea but I've had that under control for 16 months now. I feel like I'm becoming too slow to be a proficient coder, and I lack the people skills to move to management. I'd pick a lower-stress career, but I've got alimony and need the income. I've tried getting fit. I've tried improving my sleep. Vitamins, herbs, etc. The only things that work are tobacco(not nicotine, it just makes me sick) and armodafinil in small doses.
  - techer 7y ago
    Yoga/Breathing?
- battery_cowboy 7y ago
  I'm here with you, I still love the idea of software, but I can't get myself to sit there and code even the most fun projects. I had a great idea for a project to start a business, I know people would need it, but I just can't get myself to do it. It's frustrating and makes me really depressed that I'm like this.
broooder 7y ago
Flowers for Algernon
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
phaedrus441 7y ago
When I was a medical student on my psychiatry rotation we had a patient who was a history professor at a local college. He was actually admitted to the hospital after reporting himself for molesting his neighbor’s children, but this was investigated and turned out to be impossible. Nonetheless, he was convinced he had done it, and was very impulsive and saddened by it (he would tearfully confess over and over). In the end, we imaged his brain and diagnosed him with frontotemporal dementia. The most strangest aspect was that you could look on rateaprofessor.com and see how he gradually changed over the semesters. I remember a comment saying that he came in on day one, told the class they would all get A’s, and left without coming back for weeks.
jgrahamc 7y ago
I posted this hours ago and then stepped away. The story captures so much about the Lee I knew so well. I'll add one piece of praise for Lee's early architecture of Cloudflare. Everything was controlled by a single Postgres database that made very heavy use of stored procedures, that called other procedures, that called others. It was one giant program inside the database. It took me a while to comprehend what he'd done but it was really great. The database ran everything and all those functions made sure that audit logs were kept, that the calls were allowed for the user ID being passed in, and some of these procedures made external calls to APIs including getting things like SSL certificates. It was a magnificent monolith inside a database. I worked on the periphery of the database (it was truly Lee's domain) and he'd tell me what output to expect or API to create and I'd code to his spec. and we'd just hook it up. If any single artefact represents what he did at Cloudflare, it's that database. And he used to code it on a laptop we called "The Beast" because it was so crazily heavy and overloaded with memory etc. that he'd carry around a mini, test Cloudflare wherever he went.
- mynameishere 7y ago
  Working with stored procedures is just the pits. I wonder why you would describe that as "great". Maybe it's optimized, but so would be a giant executable written in assembly.
  - icedchai 7y ago
    Last time I worked with stored procs with an Oracle 8 database, over 20 years ago. PL/SQL was awful.
    - 7thaccount 7y ago
      I work with one extremely large application written in Oracle stored SQL procedures. It is a pain, but pretty efficient.
  - asguy 7y ago
    It is great: your code runs right near the data it’s working with. If it’s the pits, you need a better suited development environment. I use emacs and interactively code inside the DB. Python, Lua, JavaScript, PGSQL, whatever.
microtherion 7y ago
This was devastating to read. The family were neighbors of ours for many years, and my wife was a close friend of Lee's mother.
andmarios 7y ago
The behavior described in the article can be seen in all dementia patients. The article is written like it is a rare and unfortunate story which we watch from the sidelines, but only the age of Lee makes it unique. Many of us will experience exactly the same with a beloved one ( probably a parent, maybe a significant other). Every single part of the story except the age, all the changes in the behavior —small and large—, how hard it is to live and/or manage someone with dementia, how difficult it is to come to terms with it, etc, happens to an awful lot of people. It's just that it's not a subject people talk easily about. Last but not least, doctors are often the worst offenders in the progress of this disease. Most doctors only care about the "now", solve the problem at hand, send the patient home and be done with it. Surgery, psychotropic drugs and other forms of treatment can speed-up dementia progress. Alas, there is no incentive to research, document and act on this.
- s5300 7y ago
  You should read this https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/02/magazine/why-was-their-brothers-memory-and-behavior-so-strange.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/02/magazine/why-was-their-br... IIRC "dementia" is literally just a description of symptoms. The real truth seems to be that we just barely have the slightest fucking clue most of the time.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  I’m sure you mean well, but your comment came across as a little harsh to me, reducing the very real and very saddening decline of such a talented person, along with the people close to him that witnessed this decline firsthand, to a “so? This happens to everyone”. I agree it’s something that we should continue researching, but I don’t think it’s really fair to claim that doctors are apathetic to the issue.
  - mdonahoe 7y ago
    I viewed it more as a warning about the frequency of dementia, rather than an attempt to minimize Lee's experience.
deleted 7y ago
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pfdietz 7y ago
Turing Award winner Robert Floyd also had FTD (the variant earlier called Pick's Disease). He died of it.
7thaccount 7y ago
An old family friend was a brilliant engineer. He then had a stroke and recovered (early 50s), but within a few months started acting strange. He started making really inappropriate statements, and generally acting weird, started buying commemorative coins and not paying his bills. Then he started talking gibberish and couldn't understand people. His motor functions eventually deteriorated and he passed away a few weeks ago. Absolutely horrifying. By the time we all figured it out, it was a couple of years in.
thephyber 7y ago
Sandra did a wonderful piece in capturing Lee, his family, his work, and his degeneration. Lee was a coworker and roommate of mine for years. Some additional info that might be of interest to this crowd: He was fantastic at video games (RTS and RPG) and chess. He had impeccable hand-eye coordination. He co-founded a gaming clan. None of that is relevant anymore. There is nothing to be done. His condition can't be solved (within his timeframe) by medicine or technology. eastdakota offered to spend whatever it took, but the least worst option was to move him across the ocean and turn him into a test subject for tests that he probably wouldn't tolerate in his current state. He was deliberate in "minimizing toil". His university projects morphed into patents and a job at UnSpam and Project HoneyPot. Project HoneyPot's technology unlocked the core value to CloudFlare, which he cofounded. His projects and stacks were deliberately chosen for maximal reuse and to minimize wasted effort. I thank Matthew and Michelle for keeping the story of his journey alive. I can't imagine the tech periodicals are knocking down their doors to write stories like these. Connie Loizos had another piece on him at TechCrunch in 2019[1] [1] https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/15/cloudflare-has-a-third-cofounder-lee-holloway-whos-credited-with-making-the-company-what-is-today/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/15/cloudflare-has-a-third-cof...
- Tycho 7y ago
  Can I ask you, when Lee’s personality began to change drastically, did he maintain the same level of technical proficiency (in coding or gaming)? It is a wonderful piece on a very sad story, and after reading it that’s one of the things that I’m interested to know more about, to understand the general condition.
  - eastdakota 7y ago
    I don't know about gaming, but I do about coding. First, if I look back over the 18 years I knew him, I can see some things that make me think he had the disease the whole time. He was a brilliant coder when he first started working with me out of college, but I think he really hit his peak ability to focus and do amazing things around 2014 — right as we were rolling out Universal SSL. But, even to the end, he was great at coding. In fact, I was told that the doctors said one of the things that was unique about his presentation of the disease was that while most people lose the ability to complete complex tasks first, Lee almost seemed to do the opposite — still thriving on the complex. We brainstormed whether there were coding challenges we could keep sending him after his diagnosis to keep that part of his mind active. It never ended up happening in part because he lost a lot of his verbal communication skills around the same time, but I wonder when you hear him counting under his breath what puzzle he's still solving in his head.
caust1c 7y ago
Lee interviewed me at Cloudflare. At that time he was still quite active and very interested in his work. It was definitely a noticeable decline, but we all just attributed it to burn out. I think everyone at Cloudflare was heartbroken when Matthew announced his diagnosis. It was hard to take in. We love you Lee, you are a champ! You've left a legacy and made the world a better place. Thanks for the opportunity you and the team gave me to work at Cloudflare.
dnprock 7y ago
This story is sad and tragic. It reminds me that whenever someone comes hard at you, they probably need more help than you do. Best of luck to Lee and his family.
kabacha 7y ago
Why is this article _soooo_ long, is there a minimum character limit for wired.com homework? TL;DR: Guy was a brillaint coder and leader then got non-vital heart surgery and after recovery his personality changed. He became lethargic and uninspired - turns out he had frontotemporal dementia. It's kinda ironic that the article about disease that lowers your attention span to 30seconds is 30 minute long read.
- switchstance 7y ago
  You left out everything that makes the story human and resonate with the reader.
  - kabacha 7y ago
    That's your opinion and that's not the point of a tldr. I read the whole article and it's 2/3rds filler — including how many square meters the house had and tv brands they used. It's just bad writing.
duxup 7y ago
Watching a family member fade and the glimpses of them here and there can be horrific. My father died when I was 9. Decades later I watched my mother in law dissolve (and she was very much aware / terrified all the time) over the course of a decade. I think it altered and traumatized my wife's entire family in a way I'm not sure they understand or have dealt with. Sudden death seems so much more humane.
- barbs 7y ago
  That sounds horrific, I'm so sorry
Galus 7y ago
What a read.
XCSme 7y ago
This was a sad article that hit pretty deep. I think those kind of stories are even more terrifying for us, programmers, because we can normally lose everything but as long as we have our mind intact we can earn our living and start from zero anytime. For me the saddest thing in life is the loss of potential, when someone could have done so much more, actually wanted to do more and was even trying to do more, but then something tragic happens.
0x8BADF00D 7y ago
This story convinced me that I need some sort of legal document stating my desire to be euthanized if I ever reached this point. Ideally, I'd like to leave this world with an extremely high dose of a psychedelic drug. Not hooked up to machines in a hospital bed.
- uuuuuuuuuuuu 7y ago
  > Ideally, I'd like to leave this world with an extremely high dose of a psychedelic drug. I'd be afraid of the potential for a bad trip.
sdan 7y ago
I've always wanted to work at Cloudflare because of Lee. He was probably the first one from my high school who actually made something that people want (and I also use everyday).
- eastdakota 7y ago
  Please apply: Cloudflare.com/careers
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Wow, I had no idea Lee was an alumni–I graduated a little too early to really know of Cloudflare at that point. I’ve occasionally been asked if about notable graduates; I guess I have someone to point to now. It’s sad to hear about Lee’s diagnosis; it would have been great to meet him: aside from talking about technical stuff, I’m sure it would have been interesting to hear about his time in high school.
  - sdan 7y ago
    Yeah I think Lee is probably the most notable (other than DJ Patil) in the tech space. Initially found this a few years ago when I was doing a "deep dive" on Cloudflare. Interesting nonetheless!
ericabiz 7y ago
Coming to this late, but wanted to offer my condolences and a friendly ear if anyone reading this is dealing with FTD in a friend or relative. My dad was diagnosed in his 60’s with FTD and declined for years until he passed away in January. It has been really difficult, and even more so for my mom, as she had to deal with him becoming aggressive in later stages of FTD. It’s an ugly disease, not well-known, and hits people younger than typical Alzheimer’s symptoms would. I’m so sorry to those who have to go through FTD with relatives. It’s just extremely difficult from all angles. :( If you are dealing with this, whether with the person in the article or someone else, my contact info is in my profile.
- eastdakota 7y ago
  Thank you.
yters 7y ago
I feel that our profession, software engineering, might actually cause this sort of problem. Like the movie 'Concussion' the hyper focus on solving logic problems might cause brain damage. I've experienced something like this after multi day long bouts of coding, where at the end I become incapable of understanding simple greetings from other people. It is like the 'social signal processor' part of my brain just shuts down. And, it is this 'social signal processor' that helps keep me sane. God knows what I'd be like if I only lived in my own head 24/7. So, what kind of brain damage could it do to a person to become completely consumed by coding 24/7 (even though I'd love to do so)? "The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason." - GK Chesterton
koliber 7y ago
While reading this, I could not stop thinking about how much it parallels the story of Ravel. RadioLab did an episode on it: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/unraveling-bolero https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/unrav...
- wouterinho 7y ago
  Thank you for referring to this episode, I found it really resonated with the article.
am33 7y ago
Really shows you about how little (if any) free will exists.
johntiger1 7y ago
Incredible article, and really makes me appreciate how lucky I am to have my cognitive faculties. We really don't have as much time as we think; seize the day and make the most of what you have!
WarOnPrivacy 7y ago
Reflecting on the horror, how much worse is this condition for the families who aren't healthcare-wealthy enough to afford diagnosis? Those victims likely get written off as a worthless drain on society.
cmauniada 7y ago
I am in deep sadness over what has happened to Lee, and I feel for his family, especially Kristin. I can't help but draw parallels between this story and Flowers for Algernon. It's just sad to see such a young brilliant mind be broken down by this disease. I wasn't expecting him to be diagnosed with FTD, I will admit that reading the first part of the article painted a very different picture of what might be causing his issues. Also, since he had a heart condition, I wonder if for some reason that might have accelerated his condition?

1298 points by jgrahamc 7y ago

My father-in-law has FTD. I was just a few paragraphs into the article before I started wondering. Search the NYTimes for "Frontotemporal Dementia", and you'll find several stories, all similar :-(

shrimp_emoji 7y ago

TL;DR: frontotemporal dementia >Holloway received his death sentence with pure calm. While his family cried beside him, he complimented a doctor for having a nice wedding ring. xD

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

sourabhforu 7y ago

Tragic. Hope you live your life to the fullest Lee. And thanks for making the web safer.

kick 7y ago

This is horrifying. Conversations soon became impossible. Lee started chattering in repetitive, unceasing loops. He would tell Kristin: “We met at Cloudflare. We got engaged in Rome. We got married in Maui, Hawaii.” He repeated it hundreds of times a day. Then the loops got shorter, more cryptic. He spoke fewer sentences, instead muttering sequences of numbers or letters. At the same time, given the flashes of lucidity pointed out in this article, you have to wonder if others talking about his condition so much might make him feel like a walking corpse when those hit.

eastdakota 7y ago
It was incredibly sad to watch. The last time I saw him while he was still speaking — he is still alive but doesn’t speak or seem to recognize me anymore — he would repeat the same questions from the same conversation in the same order on a 30-minute loop. Over and over. I’ve really struggled to wrap my mind around his condition. I don’t think it’s frustrating for him. He seems to have lost the emotion to be frustrated. I think we all have a sense of Alzheimer’s because we’ve all forgotten something. This isn’t that. Lee’s memory, if anything, seemed to improve and he’d bring up little details from when we first worked together I’d long since forgotten. What seemed to go away was his ability to process those memories into something more. It’s hard to imagine losing the ability to imagine. And, as his friend and colleague, it was incredibly frustrating when we just thought he was checked out. And then devastating when we learned all this time he’d actually had a disease. I do wonder if some of his genius came from his ability to shut down some of the other noise in his life. And if the disease, for some time before it became debilitating, was almost a superpower. I’ve never met an engineer like him. I miss him every day.
- beckynot 7y ago
  That’s what I wondered too. If it was all part of a particular kind of brain. He reminded me too much of my ex-husband, also a high level programmer, and his sleep habits and growing apathy and irritability while we were together (though he might point to me as the cause). Not to say my software engineer ex has the same condition, but maybe he has a touch of it. So many of us have just a touch of something that is clinical in someone else.
- jamestimmins 7y ago
  I'm sorry for the loss you and his other friends/loved ones have experienced. Do you feel like the article was accurate and fair to the people involved?
  - eastdakota 7y ago
    Yes. Very. It was important to me and Michelle that it be a tribute to Lee’s genius and contribution to Cloudflare. We spent a long time looking for the right reporter and publication. Wired seemed appropriate given Lee’s love of technology. And Sandra was a total class act. We opened up fully to her, spending nearly a year letting her get to know us. Lee’s family was incredibly giving of their time. It takes a really talented and empathetic writer to have people feel safe and to open up to such a personal story like they did. I got the advance copy of the article last night and it’s been an emotional 12 hours reliving a lot of the last 18 years I’ve known Lee. But I’m happy we helped create something Lee’s two sons will be able to read and see a little bit of what an incredible person their dad was.
    - jamestimmins 7y ago
      Thanks for sharing that. It sounds like first and foremost, everyone wanted to do right by their friend. That alone is touching, and I'm glad that the final article was the tribute you all hoped for. It was heartbreaking and beautiful, and was an honor to be let into the lives of everyone involved. My prayer is that while this time is emotional, the process and article also provide a degree of healing as well. Again, thanks for sharing.
thephyber 7y ago
His old college roommate met up with Lee when the "looping thoughts" symptoms first started to present and the roommate (who had been overseas for 10 years before that) commented that he almost called 9/11 because he thought Lee was having some sort of a stroke. Lee's short term memory seemed to wipe and he restarted the same conversation 3 times in an hour lunch (this symptom is pretty common in my experience with other dementia sufferers). I met back with them a year later and he was very dependent upon his cell phone to look up people on Facebook, places on Google Maps, movies on IMDB, etc. (basically all nouns) in real time during the conversation to fill in the gaps in his memories. I lived with him for maybe 5-6 years and he had to look up my Facebook profile and pictures to try to pick up on any nostalgia that might catalyze a memory. I suspect there is an underlying current of frustration, but probably not a high level cognitive realization (at least not a sudden one) that his mind is degrading.

jc01480 7y ago

The idea that we’d eventually come to a day when we can no longer see ourselves. That is hell for most, a gift to few.

vikramkr 7y ago

It's a tragic story. In some way, he'll live on in his contributions to a better and safer internet, for whatever that's worth. Thank you for your contributions, Lee, and I hope you have the best life you can.

mensetmanusman 7y ago

I come from a family of extremely gifted visual thinkers (PhDs from MIT/Stanford/etc) and in the last year one of us had a heart issue that coincided with a month long bout of psychosis, where dream-like real visualizations were overlaid onto the real world. I’m convinced that the genetic effects that provide us with extreme visualization and problem solving skills are related to this particular failure mode, where schizophrenia is also common in the family tree.

bobblywobbles 7y ago
You are likely right, this is a fascinating insight.
meowface 7y ago
Yes, evolution often seems to result in these sorts of trade-offs. It seems pretty rare to get a genetic "free ride", so to speak. It's like different ways of balancing the same equation using the same resources.
basch 7y ago
The ability to make strong abstract connections transforming into misassociations? I think about this one a lot, how easy it is for pattern recognition to misfire and synthesize conclusions and connections that are partially rational and correct, but with one bad piece of input data skewing them into fantasy. Sometimes the conclusion may be right, but its magnitude, impact, or applicability are grossly overestimated. Part of what makes such gifted people is the ability to imagine, hypothesize, and use hypotheticals. This giftedness often coincides with the ability to make many parallel what if thoughts and identify the most probable. At some point, hypotheticals morph into faith and what was once a thought experiment becomes belief. What ifs break down into belief "this is actually happening, this is reality." It becomes its own compounding feedback loop, as faulty conclusions layer on top of each other over time.
- caleb-allen 7y ago
  My father is an entrepreneur, with multiple successful companies under his belt. He's got a knack for seeing opportunities others don't, synthesizing those connections. Anybody who's had a conversation with him can tell you that. His younger brother, my uncle, was diagnosed with schizophrenia at age 20 after becoming severely erratic while away from home on an LDS mission. The diagnosis devastated their family, and has been followed by decades of difficult treatment and heartbreak. What is it about my uncle that pushed him over the edge? Environment? Genetics? Pure chance? I wish I could know. My dad says that there's not much left of him except for a few moments here and there. My dad had a big family, and he's said that his younger brother always showed the most promise, growing up. Smart, charming, super friendly. 30 years on he continues to greet everybody with a smile and hug, even if he doesn't know them! It's sobering to see it in my own family, and it keeps thoughts like the one you articulated so well in the back of my mind constantly.

dgellow 7y ago

Incredibly saddening to read. I wish Lee, Kristin, and their son all the best.

Igelau 7y ago

And people don't understand why I fell into a two week existential crisis after I saw 'The Notebook' > many of the neurologists who study it believe it is underdiagnosed This is a tragedy. Of course it's underdiagnosed. Everyone around you would just think you're an asshole. In the article, it sounds like so many people fought right and were patient and loving. How many cases do we never hear about, get fought abusively, and push the last shattered remnants of a person into drugs, suicide, etc.

mh- 7y ago
> And people don't understand why I fell into a two week existential crisis after I saw 'The Notebook' Thank you. I watched that movie with my wife 15 years ago, now, and it remains the scariest, saddest movie I've ever seen.

hn_throwaway_99 7y ago

Perhaps this is too philosophical, but for anyone who has dealt with someone with a long decline into dementia, it's very difficult for me to understand a belief in God after going through that (I certainly understand some people have the exact opposite reaction, so I'm in no way saying this belief is correct). It's just difficult for me to envision a crueler God if that is indeed the case. A person who has died long before their body gives way, only to be a constant burden, with virtually no joy, and a constant reminder that your loved one is dead, yet still here. In the worst cases I say unreservedly that it is a huge relief when the person's body finally joins their mind in death.

Igelau 7y ago
I'm sorry you had to watch that happen to someone on the long decline. Occuring alongside a number of other conditions, my mother's dementia only ran a brief course before she passed away. That brief window was terrifying and heartbreaking. I understand some of the relief you mentioned. It felt like a war had ended.
mensetmanusman 7y ago
Great question. Lots of history on this topic, here is an interesting overview in regards to the Lisbon Earthquake[1]: https://youtu.be/vx8ZMkWL8hw https://youtu.be/vx8ZMkWL8hw [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1755_Lisbon_earthquake https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1755_Lisbon_earthquake
hwc 7y ago
If God exists, they are cruel and uncaring.
- adamc 7y ago
  Unproven. Maybe just not micro-managing. Maybe they enable life, and watch to see where it goes.
- claudiawerner 7y ago
  This is known as the "problem of evil" and has intrigued philosophers and theologians for centuries. There are quite a few responses to the problem[0] though it's up to you to decide if they're convincing or not. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_evil#Responses,_defences_and_theodicies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_evil#Responses,_def...

antonzabirko 7y ago

I hope they tried supplementing with herbals like Lions mane or anything that stimulates nervous cell growth. Also he lost a lot more than his self here. Terrible condition.

throwaway29303 7y ago

I just finished reading this and I'm weeping. I'm so sorry.

meowface 7y ago

So sad and bleak to read. Are there any remotely promising paths to treating or preventing neurodegenerative diseases like these in the future? Or at least to slow down the progression? Are there any experimental drugs? Will we likely just need to wait until targeted in vivo genetic engineering is understood and mastered? I know those are broad questions, but suffering from something like dementia, Alzheimer's, or Parkinson's, or having a loved one suffer from it, seems like one of the cruelest fates imaginable. The helplessness of the doctor saying there's basically nothing you can do other than to try to eat healthy and exercise... If I was given such a diagnosis while still lucid, I think I would want to try every experimental treatment available, if any exist. I'd accept almost any risk over that horrifying, inevitable outcome.

antonzabirko 7y ago
A cocktail of neural herbals, exercise, meditation, extra therapy - I hope he got all these early on.
- meowface 7y ago
  That's basically what the doctor said, though. I personally doubt those slow it down very much. I also think the science is still so poorly understood that certain supplements or foods could potentially even worsen things. (Just to throw out a totally made up scenario, maybe some compound found in some plant, and its metabolites, cause a small increase in monoamine release. This may be perceived as a mild stimulating effect in healthy people, but could hypothetically potentially speed up some feedback loop which leads to faster neuron death in people with certain neurodegenerative diseases.) Exercise and healthy eating is probably still a good idea, but basically it just seems like hoping for the best without real knowledge of what may or may not be helping or hurting.

noir_lord 7y ago

I have a chronic neurological condition that may eventually affect my ability to walk (though it is stable and the current prognosis is good and the drugs work for the pain) but when I was going through the process of finding out what it was and how bad it was the one question at the front of my mind was "will this affect me mentally?", I could live with the thought I may one day need a wheelchair but I don't think I could live knowing I was going to lose my essential sense of self. This is a beautifully written article but it hit me pretty hard, I can understand the terror having faced it for a few months, I think if I got a diagnosis of dementia I'd head to Switzerland at the point where I still could. My heart goes out to Lee and his family.

bitwize 7y ago
Losing your mental faculties is a profound fear especially for smart people. After falling down stairs in the early stages of his ALS, Stephen Hawking went to his local Mensa center to take an IQ test to make sure he was still "all there" and smart enough to do physics.

kemonocode 7y ago

Neurodegenerative diseases scare me out of my wits. All I can hope is whatever takes me is swift, or at the very least leaves my mind intact. Regardless of who you were and how rich and famous you might be, all what matters is what you'll be.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

daenz 7y ago

The question that occurs to me is: if you knew that was in your future, would you spend your last 10 good years toiling at a startup?

djohnston 7y ago
10 good years is a long time. As a founder I would guess he truly believed in the mission, at least before FTD took hold, and I think that kind of pursuit would be more fulfilling than a 10 year vacation.
reuben_scratton 7y ago
Yes. His family are financially secure, thanks to his Cloudflare millions. I could die much more easily knowing my family were safe after I'd gone.
- libria 7y ago
  That's the answer to "Would you spend your last 10 years securing a guaranteed multi-million dollar payout?" not "Would you work your tail off for a gamble?" Startup != assured success.
  - daenz 7y ago
    I should have been more specific with my hypothetical. I only meant having knowledge of the disease, not of any kind of startup mega-success.
renewiltord 7y ago
Yes. It would probably make me do so harder because it’s my life’s work and I have only that much time to do it.
ratww 7y ago
He seemed to love his work. I would.
thebusby 7y ago

billti 7y ago

> The neurologists delivered their verdict: He appeared to have a textbook case of frontotemporal dementia—known by the shorthand FTD Oh man, was that a kick in the guts when I got to that bit. My Dad was diagnosed with that in the past year, (after obviously struggling for a while), and declined rapidly. He had a different variant, and indeed the one thing that DIDN'T change was his personality. In fact, that's what kind of fooled me for a while. He would still trot out his usual bad jokes and regular phrases, but after a while you realize these are almost like reflexes, and often wouldn't really make sense in context. It was interesting to see for Lee how this seemed amplified after heart surgery. My Dad had really bad "post-operative delirium" for about a month after major heart surgery, and while he recovered somewhat, that was definitely the start of his major decline. Sadly, after moving into a care facility in mid-March, within a couple weeks he was in hospital after contracting Covid-19. He passed away on the 4th of this month from it. The only good to come out of all this was that I'd visited him many times over the past couple years and said "goodbye" many times thinking it might be the last time, even if just mentally and not physically, I'd get to see "my Dad", as I knew him. Apparently it is often a genetic disorder that can be hereditary, and you can get tested for the genetic markers. As a coder/manager myself who depends on my mind for work, and enjoys being mentally challenged and active, (and I also have young kids), something like this scares the crap out of me. I'm not sure I want to know if I might have it. For one thing, being in the U.S. healthcare system, if I did have the markers, would that then count as a "pre-existing condition" I'd have to disclose?

williamscales 7y ago
I'm so sorry for your loss.
cryptica 7y ago
>> It was interesting to see for Lee how this seemed amplified after heart surgery. My Dad had really bad "post-operative delirium" for about a month after major heart surgery, and while he recovered somewhat, that was definitely the start of his major decline. That is a strange coincidence. Could changes in bloodflow have an impact on brain cells?
- 7y ago

epx 7y ago

Remembered me at the end when HAL-9000 said "My mind is going. I can feel it.". But HAL-9000 at least knew :(

s5300 7y ago

If this story moves you, and you have the means, consider donating to CSF Leak research at Stanford. Cerebrospinal Fluid Leaks are something that can completely mimic a large amount of FTD symptoms, and even in the care of utmost professionals, can be near undetectable - and somehow, treatment can be as beautifully simple as a one and done injection... to a hellish guessing game and years of attempts. As Dr. Ian Carrol of Stanford's research has indicated, they seem to be highly misdiagnosed/undiagnosed as well. I know HN has had posts about CSF Leaks before. I truly believe they're one of the worst things we face in this age that can actually be treated with 100% recovery in some cases. However, for far too many, that really means nothing as they'll be sent to a psych facility, nursing home, or become homeless, and die as a whithered husk of what was once a human before they have the slightest indication of what is actually wrong with them, let alone make their way to one of the few places that truly treat the condition.

rubicon33 7y ago
How DOES one get diagnosed for this? Is there a test?
- s5300 7y ago
  If you have zero external support system and literally no money/income... it's an absolute shitshow, and that's about all I can tell you. Dr. Ian Carroll is arguably the best resource in the world. Starting here is probably a good choice. https://profiles.stanford.edu/ian-carroll https://profiles.stanford.edu/ian-carroll https://www.mdedge.com/neurology/migraineresourcecenter/article/132780/headache-migraine/when-suspect-csf-leak https://www.mdedge.com/neurology/migraineresourcecenter/arti... https://youtu.be/QyvWxobqKrc https://youtu.be/QyvWxobqKrc https://youtu.be/g5lsFIDzazc https://youtu.be/g5lsFIDzazc No idea why I currently can't find a non walled version of the first link. It's important - and general googling would be "when to suspect a CSF Leak Ian Carroll" Secondary to Dr. Carroll Dr. Wouter Schievink at Cedars-Sinai also has good information... He's actually the pioneer of research IIRC. Saved a dude from a diagnosis of dementia and spending the rest of his deluded days in a nursing home. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/02/magazine/why-was-their-brothers-memory-and-behavior-so-strange.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/02/magazine/why-was-their-br... IIRC - in the end, based on decades of patient history, he just opened this guy up as a last resort and nearly missed - but did find the leak. Near full recovery. It seems to be that there are some very high risk groups, like those with connective tissue disorders - specifically, Ehlers Danlos. Also, from Carroll's findings, a lot of people diagnosed with POTS are often misdiagnosed and truly have some small CSF Leak. Ehlers Danlos and POTS often go hand in hand as well...

djohnston 7y ago

devastating to read. any decline into dementia is a tragedy but in your 30's? taupathies suck.

oscribinn 7y ago

The way they describe this disease and his behavior, bending over backwards to keep him alive is just going to draw out the suffering of him, his family, his friends, etc. There's nothing bad on the other side of existence/nonexistence anyway, so why not just mercy kill what's left of the poor guy? It's either a quick and painless death or painful, slow disintegration from here on out.

asdf21 7y ago

IMO this is why brain scans should be more common / part of a normal physical every few years.

garganzol 7y ago

Could it be that Lee's productivity frenzy eventually led to this disease? I tend to practice the same style of getting things done during crunch time. I have the same behavior afterwards. Sometimes I can sleep a few days in a row after making a software release. And yes, taking a vacation with my girlfriend sometimes took the same shape: she was running circles in a new city while I was chilling at the hotel room trying to enjoy a few rare moments of rest. Reading the whole story rang a few bells to me.

thephyber 7y ago
Second had information from Lee's doctors suggest that there's a genetic component. From what I remember, he was also born prematurely and spent weeks in a NICU. Also worth noting that the disease didn't ease up after he stopped working, so the suggestion that "working less" might have avoided it is not clear.

dhruvarora013 7y ago

I'm so sorry for your loss. This hit especially close to home because my grandmother has been suffering from degenerative mental disease for the last few years. I don't live in the same country as her anymore and every time I return, it's horrifying to witness just how fast a person loses their sense of "self". I think degenerative mental disease like the one here is especially traumatizing since to most of the world, you're physically/visually still the same person. Also, the characteristics that formed your personality often morph into these harrowing alternations - in the case of my grandma - she was always immensely active and always on her feet. She now cannot sit for more than 30 seconds at a time and attempts to run away from home (with no particular destination in mind). She was (it feels strange to write past tense here) a great cook but now she enters the kitchen and has no idea what she's cooking or what step she is on. It is extremely difficult to keep her mind at ease at all. Her mind is so unable to focus or string thoughts together that she has resolved to loud abject shouting of gibberish (much like a toddler) since she has no idea how to convey what or how she got somewhere. But then for the briefest of moments she has complete lucid clarity and will ask me about my job and life, and offer to cook me my favorite dish. Much like Lee's wife, I don't really know when my grandma's last "real" day was and what my next trip is going to bring sadly. It's a sad and slow torment.

beastman82 7y ago

Oh wired, hijacking my back button. Never change from the horrible thing you are

onedr0p 7y ago
Right Click > Open in new tab

thesz 7y ago

I'd like to add to discussion [1] which shows relation between stress and autoimmune disease, [2] (Russian) case study of a Russian businessman who burned out (lost a part of cortex due to autoimmunte disease) and [3] encephalitis provoked by emotional stress. [1] https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/autoimmune-disease-and-stress-is-there-a-link-2018071114230 https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/autoimmune-disease-and-s... [2] https://www.forbes.ru/karera-i-svoy-biznes/392253-kukushechka-poehala-k-chemu-privodit-izlishniy-samokontrol-i-kak-s-nim https://www.forbes.ru/karera-i-svoy-biznes/392253-kukushechk... [3] https://www.shmabstracts.com/abstract/stress-is-the-enemy-a-case-of-anti-nmda-receptor-encephalitis-triggered-by-emotional-stress/ https://www.shmabstracts.com/abstract/stress-is-the-enemy-a-... And he was clearly overworked, by my guess.

garganzol 7y ago
It is also known that stress increases white blood cell count [1] which is essentially a mechanism behind autoimmune manifestations. Overwork leads to a stress. No wonder useful body cells can be attacked producing a whole range of resulting diseases. The risk of a heart attack also significantly increases when white blood cell count gets high as their presence fuels inflammatory processes in obstructed blood vessels. Eventually this may lead to a full occlusion which is essentially what heart attack is. [1] https://carrington.edu/blog/researchers-discover-link-mental-stress-physical-health/ https://carrington.edu/blog/researchers-discover-link-mental...

devenson 7y ago

I know someone with this disease as well. The saving grace seems to be that he doesn't seem to notice his own ongoing demise. He was fired from work and divorced from his wife before the diagnosis, so obtaining coverage from work has required lawyers and is still unresolved. His care is expensive. It's such a tragic story because this happened in the prime of life, and like the article said the adverse behaviors were initially thought to be a mid-life crisis.

raincom 7y ago

Late Dr. Oliver Sacks in his book "musicophilia" spent a chapter on Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD). That's chapter 28: "irrepressible: music and temporal lobes".

DeathArrow 7y ago

Although the brain is one of our most important organs it seems we neglect it the most. It seems appropriate to also get a brain check when we do our regular health checks, but most of us don't. We spend lots of money on medical research but tiny amounts on researching brain illnesses. I'm not saying that we should spend less on other medical conditions - that's not such thing as an unimportant disease, but we should do much more towards ameliorating brain diseases.

bvandewalle 7y ago

This is one of the saddest thing I read today and a good reminder that life is always finite.

rurban 7y ago

What they are describing, at least in the first 70% of the story, is typical for a creative developer becoming an admin or maintainer, simply becoming an obnoxious asshole. It's the job, not some illness, mostly.

weakfish 7y ago
Bad taste, friend.

jeffrallen 7y ago

Thank you Lee. Happy travels, until the sunset.

peter_d_sherman 7y ago

Excerpt: "At work, Lee was still the star engineer. At the end of the summer of 2014, he took on a project that earned Cloudflare its first bout of internet fame: The company would help websites become encrypted for free. (It was not yet standard for company websites to be encrypted.)" Yes, but, this might have earned him the ire of some Nation-States... Let's remember that Distributed-Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks on a website in one nation (which Cloudflare prevents) might very well have been an early form of content censorship by other Nation-States (China, etc.), although newer forms of this exist... When somebody who once occupied a position of Internet power like Lee Holloway did, dies unexpectedly, allegedly from "natural causes", Demand an immediate and thorough investigation Because future Internet Freedom may be at stake...

rubicon33 7y ago

Terrifying. As a software engineer, shit like this scares me. I've felt like I'm on a steady, slow, decline for the last ~4 years. Is it just burnout? Do I need a new hobby? I used to love programming... Spent 12 hours a day jamming on it. Now, I struggle to keep my mind on a line of code for more than 5 minutes. At what point is it just burnout, or at what point is it something more? That's what's terrifying to me. I imagine that was a challenge for those close to Lee. We just know so little about the human body. Our ability to easily query the state of the body, to assess which functional components are working, and which need help, is dismal. I just hope that Lee, in whatever state he is in, isn't suffering.

deleted 7y ago
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golemiprague 7y ago
Nah, pretty normal. This job is just not designed to grow with a person, for most people it is an endless loop of learning the same thing again and again in small variations every two years. No wonder it is boring and people get fed up with it.
01100011 7y ago
How old are you? I'm about to hit 45 and have been on that path for about 2 years now. It started with sleep apnea but I've had that under control for 16 months now. I feel like I'm becoming too slow to be a proficient coder, and I lack the people skills to move to management. I'd pick a lower-stress career, but I've got alimony and need the income. I've tried getting fit. I've tried improving my sleep. Vitamins, herbs, etc. The only things that work are tobacco(not nicotine, it just makes me sick) and armodafinil in small doses.
- techer 7y ago
  Yoga/Breathing?
battery_cowboy 7y ago
I'm here with you, I still love the idea of software, but I can't get myself to sit there and code even the most fun projects. I had a great idea for a project to start a business, I know people would need it, but I just can't get myself to do it. It's frustrating and makes me really depressed that I'm like this.

broooder 7y ago

Flowers for Algernon

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

phaedrus441 7y ago

When I was a medical student on my psychiatry rotation we had a patient who was a history professor at a local college. He was actually admitted to the hospital after reporting himself for molesting his neighbor’s children, but this was investigated and turned out to be impossible. Nonetheless, he was convinced he had done it, and was very impulsive and saddened by it (he would tearfully confess over and over). In the end, we imaged his brain and diagnosed him with frontotemporal dementia. The most strangest aspect was that you could look on rateaprofessor.com and see how he gradually changed over the semesters. I remember a comment saying that he came in on day one, told the class they would all get A’s, and left without coming back for weeks.

jgrahamc 7y ago

I posted this hours ago and then stepped away. The story captures so much about the Lee I knew so well. I'll add one piece of praise for Lee's early architecture of Cloudflare. Everything was controlled by a single Postgres database that made very heavy use of stored procedures, that called other procedures, that called others. It was one giant program inside the database. It took me a while to comprehend what he'd done but it was really great. The database ran everything and all those functions made sure that audit logs were kept, that the calls were allowed for the user ID being passed in, and some of these procedures made external calls to APIs including getting things like SSL certificates. It was a magnificent monolith inside a database. I worked on the periphery of the database (it was truly Lee's domain) and he'd tell me what output to expect or API to create and I'd code to his spec. and we'd just hook it up. If any single artefact represents what he did at Cloudflare, it's that database. And he used to code it on a laptop we called "The Beast" because it was so crazily heavy and overloaded with memory etc. that he'd carry around a mini, test Cloudflare wherever he went.

mynameishere 7y ago
Working with stored procedures is just the pits. I wonder why you would describe that as "great". Maybe it's optimized, but so would be a giant executable written in assembly.
- icedchai 7y ago
  Last time I worked with stored procs with an Oracle 8 database, over 20 years ago. PL/SQL was awful.
  - 7thaccount 7y ago
    I work with one extremely large application written in Oracle stored SQL procedures. It is a pain, but pretty efficient.
- asguy 7y ago
  It is great: your code runs right near the data it’s working with. If it’s the pits, you need a better suited development environment. I use emacs and interactively code inside the DB. Python, Lua, JavaScript, PGSQL, whatever.

microtherion 7y ago

This was devastating to read. The family were neighbors of ours for many years, and my wife was a close friend of Lee's mother.

andmarios 7y ago

The behavior described in the article can be seen in all dementia patients. The article is written like it is a rare and unfortunate story which we watch from the sidelines, but only the age of Lee makes it unique. Many of us will experience exactly the same with a beloved one ( probably a parent, maybe a significant other). Every single part of the story except the age, all the changes in the behavior —small and large—, how hard it is to live and/or manage someone with dementia, how difficult it is to come to terms with it, etc, happens to an awful lot of people. It's just that it's not a subject people talk easily about. Last but not least, doctors are often the worst offenders in the progress of this disease. Most doctors only care about the "now", solve the problem at hand, send the patient home and be done with it. Surgery, psychotropic drugs and other forms of treatment can speed-up dementia progress. Alas, there is no incentive to research, document and act on this.

s5300 7y ago
You should read this https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/02/magazine/why-was-their-brothers-memory-and-behavior-so-strange.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/02/magazine/why-was-their-br... IIRC "dementia" is literally just a description of symptoms. The real truth seems to be that we just barely have the slightest fucking clue most of the time.
saagarjha 7y ago
I’m sure you mean well, but your comment came across as a little harsh to me, reducing the very real and very saddening decline of such a talented person, along with the people close to him that witnessed this decline firsthand, to a “so? This happens to everyone”. I agree it’s something that we should continue researching, but I don’t think it’s really fair to claim that doctors are apathetic to the issue.
- mdonahoe 7y ago
  I viewed it more as a warning about the frequency of dementia, rather than an attempt to minimize Lee's experience.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

pfdietz 7y ago

Turing Award winner Robert Floyd also had FTD (the variant earlier called Pick's Disease). He died of it.

7thaccount 7y ago

An old family friend was a brilliant engineer. He then had a stroke and recovered (early 50s), but within a few months started acting strange. He started making really inappropriate statements, and generally acting weird, started buying commemorative coins and not paying his bills. Then he started talking gibberish and couldn't understand people. His motor functions eventually deteriorated and he passed away a few weeks ago. Absolutely horrifying. By the time we all figured it out, it was a couple of years in.

thephyber 7y ago

Sandra did a wonderful piece in capturing Lee, his family, his work, and his degeneration. Lee was a coworker and roommate of mine for years. Some additional info that might be of interest to this crowd: He was fantastic at video games (RTS and RPG) and chess. He had impeccable hand-eye coordination. He co-founded a gaming clan. None of that is relevant anymore. There is nothing to be done. His condition can't be solved (within his timeframe) by medicine or technology. eastdakota offered to spend whatever it took, but the least worst option was to move him across the ocean and turn him into a test subject for tests that he probably wouldn't tolerate in his current state. He was deliberate in "minimizing toil". His university projects morphed into patents and a job at UnSpam and Project HoneyPot. Project HoneyPot's technology unlocked the core value to CloudFlare, which he cofounded. His projects and stacks were deliberately chosen for maximal reuse and to minimize wasted effort. I thank Matthew and Michelle for keeping the story of his journey alive. I can't imagine the tech periodicals are knocking down their doors to write stories like these. Connie Loizos had another piece on him at TechCrunch in 2019[1] [1] https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/15/cloudflare-has-a-third-cofounder-lee-holloway-whos-credited-with-making-the-company-what-is-today/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/15/cloudflare-has-a-third-cof...

Tycho 7y ago
Can I ask you, when Lee’s personality began to change drastically, did he maintain the same level of technical proficiency (in coding or gaming)? It is a wonderful piece on a very sad story, and after reading it that’s one of the things that I’m interested to know more about, to understand the general condition.
- eastdakota 7y ago
  I don't know about gaming, but I do about coding. First, if I look back over the 18 years I knew him, I can see some things that make me think he had the disease the whole time. He was a brilliant coder when he first started working with me out of college, but I think he really hit his peak ability to focus and do amazing things around 2014 — right as we were rolling out Universal SSL. But, even to the end, he was great at coding. In fact, I was told that the doctors said one of the things that was unique about his presentation of the disease was that while most people lose the ability to complete complex tasks first, Lee almost seemed to do the opposite — still thriving on the complex. We brainstormed whether there were coding challenges we could keep sending him after his diagnosis to keep that part of his mind active. It never ended up happening in part because he lost a lot of his verbal communication skills around the same time, but I wonder when you hear him counting under his breath what puzzle he's still solving in his head.

caust1c 7y ago

Lee interviewed me at Cloudflare. At that time he was still quite active and very interested in his work. It was definitely a noticeable decline, but we all just attributed it to burn out. I think everyone at Cloudflare was heartbroken when Matthew announced his diagnosis. It was hard to take in. We love you Lee, you are a champ! You've left a legacy and made the world a better place. Thanks for the opportunity you and the team gave me to work at Cloudflare.

dnprock 7y ago

This story is sad and tragic. It reminds me that whenever someone comes hard at you, they probably need more help than you do. Best of luck to Lee and his family.

kabacha 7y ago

Why is this article _soooo_ long, is there a minimum character limit for wired.com homework? TL;DR: Guy was a brillaint coder and leader then got non-vital heart surgery and after recovery his personality changed. He became lethargic and uninspired - turns out he had frontotemporal dementia. It's kinda ironic that the article about disease that lowers your attention span to 30seconds is 30 minute long read.

switchstance 7y ago
You left out everything that makes the story human and resonate with the reader.
- kabacha 7y ago
  That's your opinion and that's not the point of a tldr. I read the whole article and it's 2/3rds filler — including how many square meters the house had and tv brands they used. It's just bad writing.

duxup 7y ago

Watching a family member fade and the glimpses of them here and there can be horrific. My father died when I was 9. Decades later I watched my mother in law dissolve (and she was very much aware / terrified all the time) over the course of a decade. I think it altered and traumatized my wife's entire family in a way I'm not sure they understand or have dealt with. Sudden death seems so much more humane.

barbs 7y ago
That sounds horrific, I'm so sorry

Galus 7y ago

What a read.

XCSme 7y ago

This was a sad article that hit pretty deep. I think those kind of stories are even more terrifying for us, programmers, because we can normally lose everything but as long as we have our mind intact we can earn our living and start from zero anytime. For me the saddest thing in life is the loss of potential, when someone could have done so much more, actually wanted to do more and was even trying to do more, but then something tragic happens.

0x8BADF00D 7y ago

This story convinced me that I need some sort of legal document stating my desire to be euthanized if I ever reached this point. Ideally, I'd like to leave this world with an extremely high dose of a psychedelic drug. Not hooked up to machines in a hospital bed.

uuuuuuuuuuuu 7y ago
> Ideally, I'd like to leave this world with an extremely high dose of a psychedelic drug. I'd be afraid of the potential for a bad trip.

sdan 7y ago

I've always wanted to work at Cloudflare because of Lee. He was probably the first one from my high school who actually made something that people want (and I also use everyday).

eastdakota 7y ago
Please apply: Cloudflare.com/careers
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
saagarjha 7y ago
Wow, I had no idea Lee was an alumni–I graduated a little too early to really know of Cloudflare at that point. I’ve occasionally been asked if about notable graduates; I guess I have someone to point to now. It’s sad to hear about Lee’s diagnosis; it would have been great to meet him: aside from talking about technical stuff, I’m sure it would have been interesting to hear about his time in high school.
- sdan 7y ago
  Yeah I think Lee is probably the most notable (other than DJ Patil) in the tech space. Initially found this a few years ago when I was doing a "deep dive" on Cloudflare. Interesting nonetheless!

ericabiz 7y ago

Coming to this late, but wanted to offer my condolences and a friendly ear if anyone reading this is dealing with FTD in a friend or relative. My dad was diagnosed in his 60’s with FTD and declined for years until he passed away in January. It has been really difficult, and even more so for my mom, as she had to deal with him becoming aggressive in later stages of FTD. It’s an ugly disease, not well-known, and hits people younger than typical Alzheimer’s symptoms would. I’m so sorry to those who have to go through FTD with relatives. It’s just extremely difficult from all angles. :( If you are dealing with this, whether with the person in the article or someone else, my contact info is in my profile.

eastdakota 7y ago
Thank you.

yters 7y ago

I feel that our profession, software engineering, might actually cause this sort of problem. Like the movie 'Concussion' the hyper focus on solving logic problems might cause brain damage. I've experienced something like this after multi day long bouts of coding, where at the end I become incapable of understanding simple greetings from other people. It is like the 'social signal processor' part of my brain just shuts down. And, it is this 'social signal processor' that helps keep me sane. God knows what I'd be like if I only lived in my own head 24/7. So, what kind of brain damage could it do to a person to become completely consumed by coding 24/7 (even though I'd love to do so)? "The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason." - GK Chesterton

koliber 7y ago

While reading this, I could not stop thinking about how much it parallels the story of Ravel. RadioLab did an episode on it: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/unraveling-bolero https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/unrav...

wouterinho 7y ago
Thank you for referring to this episode, I found it really resonated with the article.

am33 7y ago

Really shows you about how little (if any) free will exists.

johntiger1 7y ago

Incredible article, and really makes me appreciate how lucky I am to have my cognitive faculties. We really don't have as much time as we think; seize the day and make the most of what you have!

WarOnPrivacy 7y ago

Reflecting on the horror, how much worse is this condition for the families who aren't healthcare-wealthy enough to afford diagnosis? Those victims likely get written off as a worthless drain on society.

cmauniada 7y ago

I am in deep sadness over what has happened to Lee, and I feel for his family, especially Kristin. I can't help but draw parallels between this story and Flowers for Algernon. It's just sad to see such a young brilliant mind be broken down by this disease. I wasn't expecting him to be diagnosed with FTD, I will admit that reading the first part of the article painted a very different picture of what might be causing his issues. Also, since he had a heart condition, I wonder if for some reason that might have accelerated his condition?