Gut Punch...Or Perhaps Not

 

Happy Days...

Copyright ©2024

by Ralph F. Couey

"Life belongs to the living

and he who lives

must be prepared for change."

--Johann Wolfgang von Goeth

Everyone, I think, is familiar with the feeling of shock and dismay when normality is blown up by the unexpected.  The common reaction is "No!  This isn't happening!"  We push back in that moment, trying to evade what has befallen us.  But no amount of denial changes what has happened.  It must be faced, even embraced as a new reality.

I've been dealing with some health issues, mostly those attendant with aging.  I won't burden you with the details, as there is really nothing more boring than listening to an old person complain about their aches and pains.  But in April, my doctor, out of the blue, administered a memory test to me in his office.  Mainly due to fatigue, I bombed it miserably.  That was hard enough, but what he said next was a total gut punch.  

Dementia.

I was shocked and dismayed.  And scared.  The one thing about getting old that I feared the most was mental impairment.  I could have better dealt with the loss of a limb, but not my mind.  Everything I am, that I've ever been, that I could ever be resides there in that incredible organ inside my heard.  Without that, we are all just empty husks.

Over the last year I've noticed a tendency for short term memory dropouts, silly things like looking for car keys that are already in my pocket, or getting stuck in writing, desperately searching for that perfect word or phrase.  I've forgotten appointments, or gone on the wrong days.  I'll re-ask a question posed just minutes before.  But that time was filled with a lot of stress, mostly work-related at my last job.  Once I moved on, a lot of that went away.  But I was still worried.

In the months that followed, some other things happened, that indicated to me that this wasn't the disaster I originally thought.

I had an appointment with a neurologist and after hearing about the diagnosis, he administered a memory test.  I Aced It.  After some discussion, he put my problems down to something called "cognitive impairment."  Not sure what that means, but it doesn't seem to be dementia.  I was relieved. 

 Now, in the time since, there have still been occasional dropouts, but I continue to give all my tour presentations, all told almost two-and-a-half hours of memorized material.  I am finding though that if I get distracted, I can lose my place, and picking up the loose string can take a minute.  So focus becomes absolutely essential. When I'm driving, I always know where I am and where I'm bound.  I remember my past in detail.  I've always had difficulty with remembering people's names, so that doesn't worry me all that much.  All my appointments and obligations are on my phone's calendar.  I spend time (maybe too much time) playing various word games on my phone.  I still read voraciously, and I still write, although that's limited by having only 24 hours in each day.  Walking about the ship every day, climbing up and down ladders (stairs to you landlubbers), I log about 3 miles, so I'm getting my physical exercise.  

One thing I am very focused on is the amount of sleep I get at night.  On days that I get 6 hours or less, things don't go so well.  But over 6 hours, and better still, 7 to 8 hours, things are terrific.  I'm going to bed early, usually by 8:30 pm, and am able to fall asleep quickly.  I still get up a couple of times a night (curse you, prostate!) but can go back to sleep quickly.  My son Robbie got me one of those wrist tracker things (Whoop) which tracks my sleep patterns, as well as the amount of exercise and stress during the day, so I'm always aware of how I'm doing in those departments.

The future has always been an unknown, as there is still no reliable way to predict for its inevitable twists and turns.  But in hard times, I always fall back on the best lesson from my days hiking the Appalachian Trail:  The only thing you can do when standing at the bottom of a long, steep hill is to quit complaining and just climb the doggone thing.  Even on that terrain, I eventually reached the summit.