Having my Cake:
The past few days, I’ve had a hard time understanding things.
I don’t know if I’ve explained this issue previously, but I’ll take some time to revisit it.
When I first developed EPM, one of the biggest signals to me that there was something majorly wrong was that I wasn’t able to form words.. I wasn’t able to make sense or explain things, and I was also having a very hard time understanding what other people were saying to me. It wasn’t that I couldn’t hear them. I could, but what they were saying wasn’t registering.
In the past 10 months, that has improved, but I still have periods where I have great difficulty understanding things. It just doesn’t register.
These issues tend to happen when I’m under greater stress or really tired. Fatigue and stress don’t cause them; they just get worse.
It’s a catch 22 because when I’m really stressed, well I really want to post what’s going on.
I guess this means, please forgive any rambling or if this doesn’t really make a lot of sense.
First, I want to clarify from my previous post for those who really don’t know me: I don’t drink. I for whatever crazy reason love to make comments about drinking. Maybe I’m subconsciously wanting to become an alcoholic, but I don’t have the ability to do it.
Sorry, I shouldn’t make light of being an alcoholic. I know way too many of them, and it’s a hard disease to live with.
That said, I make references to drinking, but I VERY rarely ever drink. I get sick when I drink, and so only drink on very rare occasions and never more than one or two drinks at a time.
It suddenly dawned on me today that people might actually read my blogs and think that I’m really an alcoholic or “drowning” my sorrows in alcohol, and I wanted to clarify. I drank a beer, and literally shed a few tears.
I did not spend the night crying myself to sleep nor did I drink myself into a drunken stupor.
Actually, I drank a beer, cried a few tears, AND ate about 5 tablespoons of Ben and Jerry’s…can’t remember the name of it, but it had cookies in it…chocolate chip cookies. And it was pretty damn good ice cream.
Really folks, I don’t know what’s more depressing the fact that I literally called my last post “drowning my sorrows” or the fact that I had any sorrows to drown.
Moving on, I have no idea what the cake reference was in regards to. I had this post planned in my head around 5pm, and now I can’t remember what it was about.
I wanted to clarify the alcohol references. I’m hoping as I type what I think, I’ll remember what it was I wanted to say about cake.
OH. Bingo.
It’s come to my attention that my memory sucks. Ha. How ironic?! I was going to post about how bad my memory is and I couldn’t remember it…HA. You GOTTA love that. HA! I am literally laughing out loud. 🙂
Hopefully, you are too because if you have CPM/EPM there are very few things that you can really laugh about.
Ok, so settle down because this is the meat of my post:
My memory sucks. I know it sucks way more than most other people know it.
I KNOW my memory sucks, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t remember anything at all. Right?
Previous to my injury I could recall everything. There were very few things that I would need to write down. I could recall great details in everything, everything.
Now, I know that’s not the case. Just ask CVS who has called me for over 3 weeks, 3 times a day to pick up my prescription medications. They were literally calling me three times a day.
I made it my intention to pick up the prescriptions every day, but I forgot, everyday. There were days that I literally DROVE past the place not once by several times, and I still forgot to pick up the prescriptions.
I started having extreme anxiety over getting the prescriptions, and every night I would sit down on my couch or lay down in my bed and think: SHIT, I forgot those FREAKING prescriptions AGAIN. I’ll have to do it tomorrow.
And then I would forget again tomorrow.
Guess what? I finally picked up the prescriptions. Yep, yesterday. Guess what? The reason I was getting three calls a day was because I had three prescriptions to pick up. Guess what? I could not remember dropping them off. I had NO recollection of dropping them off. I thought I was going to pick up my thyroid medication because I’m almost out of them, and I thought, “CVS is calling me because I called in my thyroid prescription a few weeks ago because I knew I would forget calling it in and I wanted to make sure I had them before I run out”.
Guess what? It wasn’t my thyroid medication.
FREAK. The cycle begins again!
This is just the TIP of the iceberg regarding how my memory has been effected by EPM.
I know I don’t remember things, BUT I also do not want to admit that I don’t remember things!!
So how does this insanity work?
I want my cake and I want to eat it too!
I want people to understand that I have memory issues, but I don’t want to admit that I “forgot” something when I do. Guess how well that is working?
Folks, I really believe that I remember things better than what other people account that I do, but I also realize that have limitations, but I do not want to account for what other people tell me that my limitations are.
And so begins the paranoia and my frustration and my anger and all the crap that you can associate with slowly losing your mind.
My pride and mind is telling me that I remember all of the times that I forget. I think, I may not remember when I need to, but I do remember at some point, and that is good enough.
But then, I was in my car today driving to the health food store, and I couldn’t remember what the two things that I needed to remember were. It wasn’t the things that I was going to buy from the health food store. I really felt I would remember those things, but I needed to do two things today, and I still have no idea what those two things are. Or if there are actually only two things that I really need to remember.
Of course, I got to the health food store and I didn’t remember all of the things I actually went there to buy because I thought, there aren’t that many things, so I won’t forget any of them. I don’t need to make a list because I can manage just picking up a few things at the store. (See, I even try to delude myself into thinking that my memory issues aren’t that bad.)
So here’s the craziness. I KNOW I HAVE MEMORY ISSUES, I KNOW IT, but I DON’T WANT TO BELIEVE WHEN OTHER PEOPLE TELL ME THAT I’M NOT REMEMBERING CORRECTLY.
I’m NOT WRONG. THEY ARE. And to make things truly crazy, THEY KNOW I HAVE MEMORY ISSUES AND SO THEY ARE LYING TO ME AND ARE TRYING TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THOSE MEMORY ISSUES.
Folks, this is how it is. This is how insanity works.
I do not know when people are taking advantage of my brain damage, when I’m wrong, when I’m right, when someone else is lying to me.
Unless, I carry a voice recorder around everywhere I go, I do not have any proof as to whether or not someone said this or didn’t say that.
I really believe people are taking advantage of my memory disability, but how do I know? What if it is just me? What if I’m not remembering as much as I think I remember?
I have Alzheimer’s, dementia, and paranoia all wrapped into one neat little package called EPM. OR people are exploiting my weakness and disability.
TRY FIGURING THIS ONE OUT FOLKS!! Is it ME or THEM? And how do you tell?
This doesn’t even touch the fact that I am LOSING memories. I’m losing precious events in my life that I CAN NOT remember. I can not remember if I took a close friend out for her birthday lunch. I really can’t remember it, and if I can’t remember that then how many other MUNDANE, unimportant things am I forgetting?
I leave you that little gem to think about because if you don’t have CPM/EPM, but a member of your family or friend does, consider what type of insanity they are facing every day before you get angry when they ask you for the twelfth time today, what’s for dinner?
Just think, almost everyone who is over the ago of 60 is experiencing some form of memory loss or dementia, YOU could be that person one day, and how will you feel when you start to lose your mind?
(To my CPM/EPM friends: I just want to let you know, there is hope with these issues. I’m not saying they are going away, but I’m learning skills to deal with them through, my absolutely amazing cognitive therapist, Angela C. God Bless, her! I think she’s going to buy me a life time supply of post it notes 🙂 Love to Angela 🙂 )
Hyponatremia and Central Pontine Myelinolysis 