Famed Rock Star with ‘Curable’ Dementia Nearly Loses Career

Dick Wagner had enjoyed a successful life on stage, playing lead guitar for bands such as Alice Cooper (with whom he co-wrote many top-selling songs, including the 1975 hit “Welcome to My Nightmare”), Aerosmith and Kiss when he had a stroke and a heart attack in 2007.

“I woke up from a coma after two weeks with a paralyzed left arm,” says Wagner, now 70 and living in Arizona. “My profession as a guitarist, I thought was over.” Unfortunately, his own personal horror show had just begun. Wagner worked hard at rehabilitation, but new symptoms began to appear: mental fuzziness and an odd gait.

“I couldn’t turn to the left as I walked, only to the right, and I would do a spiral and fall,” he says. “I fell completely flat on my face in the driveway on the concrete. I didn’t know what had happened to me.”

Another fall by his swimming pool precipitated a blood clot and surgery. Wagner was convinced his career was over. But in 2011, he was diagnosed with normal pressure hydrocephalus (NPH) — a condition caused by a build-up of spinal fluid in the ventricles of the brain, which puts pressure on nerves that control the legs, bladder and cognitive function. Doctors at Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix surgically placed a shunt in his head to redirect the fluid through a tube under the skin to his abdominal cavity. Today, Wagner is back on tour with a band in Denmark.

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