Monday, June 21, 2010

Losing "Me"

How does one who is losing their mind communicate effectively how they feel about losing their mind? The most frustrating part of this disease is the way it affects my brain. It's what makes me who I am...everything stored within it is essentially "me". To see it being chipped away a little at a time, is like losing yet another piece of myself, over and over again. I imagine this is what it must feel like to go insane.
This morning, after many attempts to sleep without success I attended my psychologist appointment. By the time I arrived I was barely able to walk across the parking lot to the office. It took me about 15 minutes to catch my breath and be able to talk. My speech became more and more slurred, to where he could barely understand me. The words were there, in my head, they just became more and more difficult to speak. 20 minutes in, I could no longer form words and was in tears. Images, feelings, concepts all whirring around in a frenzy inside my skull, and I couldn't express a single bit of it. I grabbed a pen and paper to try to convey what was going on, but even communicating on paper proved too difficult a task for my exhausted brain. After about 30 minutes, between sobs and pounding my fist on the note pad I managed to get my hand and brain to cooperate a little and scrawl out a few images. With a lot of gestures and pointing, I explained what was going on to some satisfactory degree. He must be a whiz at pictionary and charades, because he caught on in seconds. I'm SO grateful for that. It made an already scary and frustrating event, that much more manageable.
I dozed in the waiting room for about half hour before getting back on the road, and crawled into bed when I got home. I did manage to sleep for a few hours on and off, but am still exhausted. I've said a total of 6 words since coming back home, all of them mangled. At least I've had enough rest to be able to put words together on the screen, even though they cannot even come close to doing justice to what I experienced today. I'm sure I'll be talking better after more sleep.

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