Searching for a memory

Recovery…it comes in fits and starts. Between those ‘fits and starts’, Symptomatic behavior that has seemed to fade and be leaving leap forward and take charge of our life in a way that isn’t suspected up till then.

Bouts of depression, lasting a few hours, or all day, take charge of your perspective and rationality, so that your outlook becomes dark and cloudy and filled with dread.  One can be overtaken by sudden spasms of anxiety, apparently linked to some approaching doom, but linked to nothing that can be discerned. The experience is of being frightened, twisted in uncertainty, figuratively gasping for breath to ward off…what?

All of these combine in one form or another, with the cruelest of all the symptomatic experiences: memory loss. Everyone reassures you that they forget things all the time, and then they wave it off with a sigh or a chuckle. I’ve stopped trying to explain that while this, indeed, happens to me, the experience I’m trying to survive is the sudden awareness that whole blocks of your life are missing. It might be a chunk from a decade ago. It might be the whole of yesterday. Worst of all, it might be the last four hours, leaving you wondering what, if anything, you have been doing, or have done.

An example: nearly two weeks ago, a courier dropped of a package with my name on it. I opened it, and discovered a jazzy and tiny piece of technological equipment in an apparently indestructible plastic bubble. Some months ago, I had read about this gizmo, and even looked at them in a tech store. After discussing the wonders of this bit of magic with Beatrix, I forgot it…or did I? That was the question that began to haunt me over the next few days. I was preoccupied with trying to find a way to open the plastic bubble short of taking a hammer to it. I was also preoccupied with the possibility that I had ordered this for myself. But I could locate no memory of that event. Not being able to locate a memory is part and parcel of the outcome of a cerebral event. I repeatedly asked Beatrix if she had ordered it, or if she could remember me ordering it. Blanks all around.

Now, for you normal people out there, as distinct from us ‘brain damaged’ folk, it would seem logical to wonder if this package was related to Christmas coming. Such logic rarely intrudes on the thought process of a wounded brain. The focus is narrowed; the search for the needed memory becomes intense, obsessive even. And, of course, this intense internal wrestling inevitably raises the blood pressure – the one symptom you are told to avoid. “Don’t get excited about anything” was the straightforward physician advice I got on leaving the hospital. I quipped, “What, you want me to exchange my personality for a new one?”

Trying to remember, trying to locate an action, or even a decision, that would give a reason for this arrival, is an exhausting exercise, and one that can be marked by blood pressure results. Of course, the search was not aided by the gizmo itself. Cunningly packaged so that a seven year old could figure it out in a few minutes, an old geezer, brain damaged and technologically deficient, worked on for hours. Fruitlessly. The whole thing was like a computer game. If you crack one level, you are immediately faced with an even greater challenge. I opened the bubble! Instructions for further advancement were contained in cryptic sketch drawings of what to do, No language descriptions. (Why would a technologically savvy seven year old need words?) I discovered words on an attached cardboard. It was black matte, with tiny lettering on it in silver ink. Under the strongest light I could find, and with glasses and a magnifying glass, I could read nothing. Not only anxiety and exhaustion, but also a profound sense of defeat, followed by depression. Not only was I unable to remember when or if I ordered this ‘thing’, but I couldn’t access it or understand the directions to access it. And my blood pressure had been ‘up’ for some days.

I did the only sensible thing at that moment. I put the whole thing, gizmo, bubble, cardboard and discs in a large bowl out of my sight. I contemplated, not for the first time, the ultimate action of returning the package, stated that I hadn’t ordered this thing. Had I? Or hadn’t I? I still had no idea.

This lengthy story of a tiny event that became the locale for an accumulation of post-stroke symptoms is illustration only. Recovery proceeds, lurch, stumble, step, pause, then sIt’s like watching a very drunk man try to navigate the street. It’s funny to watch, sometimes hysterically so. Once in my life I experienced that state. Not funny; terrifying. Trying to ‘do the rational, the ordinary’ while attending, with intense focus, on making your legs work the way they did this morning.

Learning, just recently, that the gizmo was indeed, ordered by others for me did not produce a sense of relief. It was more like running face first into a wall. How come I couldn’t figure that out? How could I be so stupid (a word that crops up a lot as you struggle to look normal)? Why didn’t someone tell me this was coming, so I wouldn’t have to spend so much energy wracking my brain for a memory that wasn’t there? It’s bad enough to look for a memory you’ve lost (but did have); worse, to look for a memory that never was there. At the end, you sit there, figuratively gasping for breath, exhausted by the race or the climb, and totally demoralized to learn that there was no race to run, no hill to climb. You were wasting your time and energy on……nothing. For the time being, not a good day.