Rock Star's Dementia: Dick Wagner, Guitarist, Resurrects Career Amid Alzheimers-Like Ailment, Details
Dick Wagner was enjoying a successful career on stage as the lead guitarist for bands such as Alice Cooper, Aerosmith and Kiss when he suffered a stroke and a heart attack in 2007.
Wagner, who is now 70 years old and residing in Arizona, spoke to ABC News about his ailments.
"I woke up from a coma after two weeks with a paralyzed left arm. My profession as a guitarist, I thought was over."
The legendary guitar player along with Cooper penned most of the band's top-selling songs, which includes the 1975 hit "Welcome to My Nightmare."
Unbeknownst to himself, Wagner's own personal misery was just beginning. While working feverishly at rehabilitating himself, symptoms such as mental fuzziness and an unorthodox gait began to appear.
"I couldn't turn to the left as I walked, only to the right, and I would do a spiral and fall," he explained. "I fell completely flat on my face in the driveway on the concrete. I didn't know what had happened to me."
Wagner also fell once again near his swimming pool and incurred a blood clot that needed surgery. At the time, he was starting to come to terms with his career being over.
The rocker was diagnosed in 2011 with Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus (NPH), a condition that occurs when spinal fluid builds up in the ventricles of the brain, putting pressure on nerves that control the legs, bladder and cognitive function. Doctors at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix had to surgically insert a shunt in his head in order to redirect the fluid to a tube beneath the skin to his abdominal cavity. For the remainder of his life, Wagner must drain it every day.
Fortunately, the rocker has now returned to tour with a band in Denmark and is feeling healthy again.
"I am like a new man almost overnight," he said. "For five years, I couldn't even pick up a guitar - I didn't have the strength or the coordination."
NPH usually occurs in an individual after the age of 55 and is known to imitate the dementia of Alzheimer's and the impaired motor skills of Parkinson's disease. It's said that roughly 5 percent of dementia patients have actually been diagnosed with NPH.