Linda and the Brain

This week I had a cognitive functioning test. Dr. Jane and I decided to do this after I had a couple of memory scares. The worst scare was when I noticed a plant was missing. It was a small plant that had not been doing all that well but it was very disturbing to realize it was gone. Since my cat, Boo, is the only other being in this apartment I was a little freaked out. Why would someone come in and take a weak plant and nothing else? Had Boo knocked it over while I was on vacation and the cat sitter cleaned it up? No. This had me pretty upset for about four days until I found a bowl in the cupboard. Not just any bowl. It was the one blue fiesta ware bowl that I had been using to catch excess water underneath the missing plant. It was obvious that I had at some point thrown out the plant and cleaned the bowl.

I don’t know if there are other things I have forgotten because I live alone with Boo. Boo only gets upset when I forget to feed her. She doesn’t care about anything else.

I realized a while ago that I have FOA – fear of Alzheimer’s disease. My fear is not based on anything other than the fear of losing my brain. There is no history of Alzheimer’s in my family. I am just very attached to my brain.

I know this is as common fear, but I have become somewhat hyper vigilant, maybe even a little obsessive.

This is all due to the fact that I have long felt that my brain was the only thing I really had going for me. Thanks to genetics I am a large woman with a propensity to use food to manage my emotions. I grew up tall and heavy with curly hair during an era when skinny women with long straight hair were considered the beauty standard. Think Marcia Brady and you will have a good portion of the girls with whom I went to high school.

It was apparent pretty early that my brains were the only thing that I had to count on. I have had to count on my brains when my looks/weight/gap teeth/scars all got in my way. When I interviewed for a company where I eventually worked for thirteen years, I was not hired until I showed my business school grades. The manager who was interviewing almost did not hire me because of my size. She had the notion that large people were lazy.

I did have about fifteen minutes in the mid to late 80s when I was pretty cute. Some may even say I was hot. I had lost a ton of weight and was working out to the point of exercise anorexia. It was at this point in my life that it became apparent that my intelligence far outweighed my common sense and I behaved pretty badly for a while. I really don’t regret any of it. Hell, I relished every moment of all the attention I got, but that lasted for a short while and I am very glad that I didn’t lose too many brain cells in the process. However, those years may have done some damage as evidenced in my current memory problems.

In the way that some women worry about losing their looks and resort to plastic surgery and botox, I worry about my brain. I understand their need to hang on to their looks, because society and the media have led them to believe that without their looks they do not have anything to offer. In the same way, society and the media led me to believe that since I didn’t have the looks, I had better find another way to survive. This is not to say that beauty and brains do not go together. They do. But as superficial as the world can be, beauty is what attracts and intelligence can be intimidating. But intelligence is all I have. Please don’t send me emails or make comments about how you find me pretty or whatever. Anyone who really knows and loves me has gotten to the point that they can see who I am. The world at large, though, tends to judge based on looks so I have worked hard to make sure that I have the intelligence to compensate.

Hence, that is why I fear losing my brain. The test showed some areas where I am doing quite well and other areas where I am at a deficit. It pretty much verified what I have known all along. My brain does not remember what I was doing one minute ago so I tend to lose myself in knitting patterns. I can’t memorize music for the life of me and can’t improvise because I can’t remember what I just did. I walk into rooms and wonder why I am there. I forget someone’s name within moments of hearing it. It’s not attention deficit disorder. I can maintain attention. I just can’t remember shit from one minute to the next. Hell, when I turned fifty, whatever part of my brain knew my right from my left threw that information out and I am constantly looking at other people in yoga class to figure out which way I am supposed to turn. When someone is in the car with me and giving directions, it is best if they point rather than tell me to turn right or left. It just doesn’t compute otherwise.

The good news is that I am not losing my mind. I am pretty much still intact even though I am sure that twenty years of alcohol abuse did do some damage. I now have a baseline to compare against in the future. It was worth it to have the test done. It eased my anxiety a bit and I can go on my merry way and continue to forget things. Too bad they don’t have botox for the brain, though. I would jump on that in a heartbeat.

The Language of Middle Aged Women

Have you overheard the conversations between middle aged women lately?
There is a specific lack of names.
“Did you see that movie with what’s her name, you know, the one from that other movie about that girl who fall in love with that actor, you know, the guy who used to be on that television show that our kids watched Friday night?”
“Yes, I know her, she is the one with the hair, you know, she was in those commercials and then she stopped making movies for a while because she had to go, you know , where was that again – the place people go when they can’t stop drinking?”
“Yes, what is her name again? I can see her face and her name is on the tip of my tongue.”
“Oh, don’t worry. It will come back and I know who you mean. I just saw her on t.v. the other day on that talk show. You know the one – the one with the short blonde - oh, what is her name? – she has a bunch of kids and she used to be on a soap opera and she is married to that gorgeous guy. What was his name again?”
“Yeah, her!!!”
“Well, it has been nice talking to you. I have to go pick up my son at the airport.”
“Which one?”
“Manchester.”
“No! Which son?”
“Oh, you know, the one that went down south this past year to work where that thing happened last fall.”
“Oh, yeah, say hi to him for me.”

Time and Memory

This whole notion of time speeding up - I know you have heard about it – has me thinking. I feel like I crossed a point a few years ago when life shifted gears and sped up. Now I spend less time waiting for things to happen and events zip by so quickly I barely have time to breathe.
I have a theory about why it is so much easier, as we get older, to remember things that happened forty years ago than it is to remember a shopping list for tomorrow. It is because time moved so much slower then. We had time for the information to get into our brain and be properly stored. With time moving so fast there are days when I feel that I am trying to catch information with a butterfly net and names, dates, events, ideas and shopping items keep slipping through the holes. Nothing sticks. Nothing has time to get firmly embedded into the memory banks. If it does, it has a precarious hold and something else may easily knock it off.
My brain does not seem to be able to discriminate between what is important information to keep and what is meaningless. I can easily recall my phone number from forty years ago but struggle to remember my grandchildren’s birthdates. Sometimes a sequence of numbers will pop into my head for no reason and I will realize that I am remembering my locker combination from high school.
My father used to run through a whole list of names before getting the right one. When he spoke to me he would start with “JoAnne”, then “Barb” and finally “Linda”. The same in reverse would happen to my mother and sister. He eventually just called my sister and me “punkin’” as a means of making sure to get it right the first time.
I hear people everywhere talking about how time is just speeding up. Things are happening faster than we can take in the information. Technology is moving so fast that information learned in the first two years of college can be obsolete by graduation. It feels like just yesterday that I was holding my youngest granddaughter, Lizzie, in my arms and now she is almost four years old, ready to take on the world as Princess Peach with her boyfriend, Mario. I had no idea who these people were until she explained the whole Nintendo game world to me in five minutes, hands flying, with vivid detail. I was playing Candy Land at three years old. How does this all happen?
It is all very disconcerting. Mick Jagger is dancing around on stage in tight pants while in his sixties and I can’t seem to figure out where the nineteen sixties and seventies went. He is obviously stuck back in time while Keith Richards walks around looking like a forty year old corpse. I have stopped watching PBS specials with classic rock musicians because I always wonder who these balding, gray people are lip syncing to my favorite songs.
I may be rambling here. My mind is trying very hard to figure out where everything is happening. That is if time can happen in a place. It is like trying to catch dust motes between your fingers. Just when you think you have one, it disappears and you wonder if you ever had it at all.
I asked Lizzie to slow down. I asked her not to grow up so fast. She is my last grandchild and I am going to miss the cuddling and the Lizzie Mae and Grandma Mutual Admiration Society meetings. When I ask though, she very thoughtfully looks at me and says “But I have to, Grandma. I have to grow up.” Why does it have to be so fast? Why can’t the good things just slow down enough so that I can savor a moment without thinking about the loss coming so quickly? I just hope the Lizzie memories find a good strong place to hold onto in my memory banks so that I can find them easily when she is all grown up.