Marlene called me at 6:14 this morning, which is when she calls about anything she’s already decided. The FDA had approved a new Alzheimer’s drug overnight, she said, and she wanted me to know she’d been ahead of them by approximately forty years and one mason jar of dried rosemary.
I want to be careful here because I am not anti-medicine. I am pro-remembering. There is a difference, and the difference is roughly fifty-two thousand dollars a year, which is what the new infusion costs before the part of the insurance call where they put you on hold and your husband forgets why he picked up the phone.
The drug, from what I gathered between Marlene’s exhales, is a monoclonal antibody, which Marlene pronounced “mono-clonal” like it was a brand of yogurt she didn’t trust. It works, allegedly, by clearing amyloid plaques from the brain. It also, according to the label that nobody reads because the label is forty-one pages, can cause brain swelling and brain bleeding, which Marlene noted is two of the three things you’d think a brain drug would specifically avoid.
Marlene’s protocol is older than the FDA and considerably more generous with its side-effect profile. She drinks a tea every morning made of rosemary, lemon balm, a single bay leaf she rotates weekly, and what she calls “a respectful amount of sage.” She smells a clove before she gets out of bed. She does not own a microwave. She walks to the mailbox barefoot in any weather above thirty-eight degrees because, in her words, “the ground remembers for you.”
I ran all this past my sister-in-law Tessa, who works the front desk at a chiropractor in Weaverville and has audited two units of a master’s in public health, so she’s basically read the literature. Tessa said the issue with the pharmaceutical pipeline is that you cannot patent a walnut. I wrote that down. I am going to write it down again here. You cannot patent a walnut.
Over in Memory Is a Muscle and They Sold Us a Couch — which is a private Facebook group I joined in 2021 and which now has eleven thousand members and a pinned recipe for a turmeric paste you keep behind your ear — the consensus by 8 a.m. was that the new approval was timed to spring, when people are most likely to forget where they put their taxes. I don’t know if I believe that. I don’t know that I don’t.
What I do believe is the lived experience of women in their seventies who can still tell you the phone number of the house they grew up in. Marlene’s friend Doreen, who plays bridge with a woman whose grandson is reportedly in a clinical trial in Chapel Hill, said the trial nurses keep losing their badges, and you can draw whatever conclusion from that you want. I have drawn mine.
My carveouts, because I will be honest with you the way I am honest with my children: I do allow my mother-in-law her one prescription, because she earned it, and I do accept that Alzheimer’s is real and devastating and not something a single bay leaf is going to outmuscle. But there is a wide forgiving country between “a bay leaf” and “an IV drip that costs more than my first car and may make your brain swell on a Tuesday.” That country is where most of us actually live, and it is staffed almost entirely by grandmothers.
Cleo, who is nine and has been reading over my shoulder, just asked what amyloid is. I told her it’s the gunk our brains make when we don’t go outside enough. She accepted this, because she is nine and because, as far as I can tell, it’s broadly true.
Marlene called back at 9:40 to say she’d made a second pot of the tea and was sending me a jar in a padded envelope with a bay leaf taped to the lid for, and I quote, “protection from the news.” The FDA can approve what it wants. My pantry has been approved by four generations of women who knew where the keys were.