The Problem

In 2011 I was hospitalized for six months with necrotizing fasciitis—the flesh-eating bacteria that sounds like something from a horror movie and, I can assure you, looks and feels like one too. I was in pain, I was anxious, and I was not shy about asking for something to take the edge off. The something was Ativan, a benzodiazepine that does a fine job of making you not care that your leg is trying to kill you.

What nobody mentioned—or if they did, I was too anxious to hear it—is that Ativan has a well-documented side effect: it eats your short-term memory like a moth eats wool. Not all at once, but steadily, one hole at a time.

The way it showed up in me was mid-sentence. I would start talking, and somewhere between the subject and the verb the thought would simply vanish. Not trail off. Not get muddled. Vanish, the way a soap bubble does—one instant it is there, the next it is not, and you are left staring at the spot where it used to be. This happened several times a day. Then several times an hour.

I learned to compensate by not speaking. This turned out to be an excellent way to develop listening skills, and I recommend it if you can manage the discipline. But for a lifelong storyteller, it was like being a singer who has lost his voice. The stories were still in there. I just could not get them out.

It wasn't just speaking aloud, either. I could be typing away, and suddenly forget what I was even writing about. I learned that these lapses typically lasted just aboput 40 seconds, so I would just wait them out, and then the thought would come back. Usually.

The problem didn't start until I left the hospital. I had stopped taking Ativan, of course; but the memory lapses continued and if anything, they were getting worse. By the time I moved in with my daughter in 2023, I had more or less accepted that this was just how my brain worked now.

The Infusion

My daughter was going through a phase where she was experimenting with longevity treatments. IV infusions of various substances, each one promised by someone on the internet to add years to your life. One of those substances was glutathione.

She invited me to try an infusion. I said sure, because I was living in her house and the least I could do was be a good sport about her experiments. Also, as we all know, I am generally willing to try anything. I did not expect anything dramatic to happen. I had never heard of glutathione. I went along the way you go along when someone offers you a sample at the grocery store: politely, without expectations, and mostly to avoid a conversation about why you will not try it.

That very day—not the next week, not gradually over a month, that day—the lapses began to diminish. I noticed it that evening, when I was telling my daughter how the infusion had gone. I had learned to not try for more than short sentences, but I made it through my entire story without losing the thread. I could not believe it. And it's gotten since. I almost never have a lapse anymore, and when I do, it is usually when I am very tired.

What Glutathione Actually Is

Glutathione is a tripeptide—three amino acids (glutamate, cysteine, and glycine) linked together—that your body manufactures primarily in the liver. It is present in virtually every cell you have. Biochemists call it the "master antioxidant," not because it sounds impressive on a supplement label but because it does something no other antioxidant does: it recycles the other antioxidants. Vitamins C and E, for example, neutralize free radicals and are then used up. Glutathione restores them so they can go back to work. It is the manager of the cleanup crew.

It also plays a central role in detoxification. Your liver uses glutathione to bind to toxins—heavy metals, drug metabolites, the chemical byproducts of simply being alive—and escort them out of the body. Without adequate glutathione, those toxins accumulate. This is not speculation; it is basic biochemistry, the kind taught in first-year medical school courses that most doctors promptly forget.

Here is the inconvenient part: your body produces less glutathione as you age. By your seventies, your levels may be half what they were at twenty. This decline correlates with increased oxidative stress, reduced immune function, and—importantly for my story—neurodegeneration.

What Ativan Did to My Brain

To understand why glutathione helped, it is useful to understand what Ativan broke.

Ativan (lorazepam) is a benzodiazepine. It works by enhancing the effect of a neurotransmitter called GABA, which is your brain's built-in brake pedal. GABA slows neurons down. That is why benzodiazepines reduce anxiety—they tell your brain to stop revving so hard.

The problem is that the hippocampus—the brain structure responsible for forming new memories—relies on a process called long-term potentiation, which is essentially neurons learning to fire together by firing together. Ativan suppresses exactly this process. It does not erase existing memories; it prevents new ones from forming properly. The clinical term is "anterograde amnesia," and it is not a rare side effect. It is the expected effect. Anesthesiologists use benzodiazepines specifically because they cause amnesia—they do not want you remembering the surgery.

What the textbooks are less clear about is what happens when the drug is gone but the damage lingers. Prolonged benzodiazepine use can leave the brain in a state of chronic oxidative stress. The neurons that were suppressed do not always bounce back to full function. They are weakened, inflamed, and struggling with an accumulation of reactive oxygen species—the biochemical equivalent of rust.

How the Repair Might Work

Glutathione is the brain's primary defense against oxidative stress. It is present in high concentrations in healthy brain tissue, and depleted glutathione levels have been linked to Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and other neurodegenerative conditions. The connection is not subtle: when the brain runs low on glutathione, neurons die faster.

My theory—and I want to be clear that this is an informed layperson connecting dots, not a neurologist publishing a paper—is that the prolonged Ativan use left my hippocampal neurons in a state of oxidative distress. They were functional enough to let me remember where I lived and who my grandchildren were, but too compromised to reliably hold a thought for the thirty seconds it takes to finish a sentence. The glutathione infusion flooded those neurons with exactly what they needed to start cleaning up the damage.

This would explain why the effect was so immediate. Glutathione does not need to build up over weeks the way some supplements do. It goes to work as soon as it reaches the cells. If those cells were starving for antioxidant protection, delivering a concentrated dose would be like giving water to someone who has been walking through the desert—the relief is not gradual. It is instant.

Why Liposomal?

After the infusion demonstrated that glutathione worked for me, I was not about to schedule IV appointments for the rest of my life. I looked for an oral supplement. And here I ran into the problem that makes glutathione tricky: your digestive system destroys it.

Regular oral glutathione—the kind in a standard capsule—has a bioavailability of roughly three to five percent. That means for every hundred milligrams you swallow, your body absorbs maybe three to five. The rest is broken down by digestive enzymes before it ever reaches your bloodstream. You might as well be swallowing confetti.

Liposomal glutathione solves this by wrapping the molecule in a phospholipid shell—a tiny bubble made of the same material as your cell membranes. This shell survives the acid bath of your stomach, passes through the intestinal wall intact, and delivers its payload directly into the cells. Studies show liposomal delivery increases blood glutathione levels by roughly forty percent compared to non-liposomal forms. It is not quite as effective as an IV infusion, but it is close enough, and it comes in capsules, two of which I take with breakfast. (And the rest of my morning "stack".)

Three Years Later

I started ordering liposomal glutathione capsules from Amazon about three years ago. I have taken them every day since. The memory lapses have all but vanished entirely—they still surface when I am very tired, the way an old injury aches when the weather changes. But the difference between where I was and where I am is the difference between a storyteller who cannot finish a sentence and one who can hold a room.

I am not a doctor. I am not recommending that anyone throw away their prescriptions and start ordering supplements from Amazon. What I am saying is that this particular supplement, in this particular delivery system, produced a result in me that was immediate, measurable, and sustained. I started a sentence and I finished it. I told a story and I got to the end. After years of silence, I got my voice back.

For a storyteller, that is not a small thing. That is everything.