insanity diary

And so it starts with migraines, an ophthalmic problem (you lose half your sight in both your eyes), you start sweating and then in 10 to 30 minutes, the real migraine, the killing headache, disorientation, nausea, at times vomiting (dry heave often), and you are out for the day, maybe the next day too, at times another day after that.

Then comes the time when for the first time you also get the bonus of having your speech get slurred and you can witness yourself, in public no less, unable to mouth out the words you want to say ("amazing, business, impossibility,...") for twenty minutes in a professional context, and then the migraine comes, and you do the same the next day, that time wihtout the public, just in your hotel room.

You feel disoriented, but you also notice that this time it is more serious, you have more than the usual forgetting of an idea, a word or train of thought, you have "absences" when for twenty minutes to two hours, you don't understand, you don't remember, you don't assimilate what you are being told and you roll with the punches, with literally no grasp of what is going on. Fatigue, stress, exhaustion, form a long period of weeks, months in fact, of constant demands on you.
And you already know that deeper, more serious thought or intellectual activity, research, etc.., is gone. You don't have it any more. Age? Something else? A degenerescence, maybe hereditary?

And one doctor hits you with: "I am going to put you on half-time," while the next one two days later asks you how far you are from retirement anyway...
So, it's the heap? Handicapped, retarded, over the hill, too old?

You do some tests, you see more doctors, nothing really wrong, just the usual imperfections, aging, etc.. And so you feel you got over the incident, the attack. And then it comes back again, the stuttering recurs here and there, and worse, you have another "absence", discussing what type of leave they might put you on (irony!), you find yourself again not assimilating anything... Embarrassing,and here you don't even bother calling back,as you did with one of the docs to have the various medicines repeated to you, because you never got it, or even remembered anything, the first time around...

Depressing, or rather .. even more depressing...
And.. I was (yes: WAS) a sharp cookie, a promoter (or "seller") of intelligence, and still lucid at times... This is going to be tough.... (because I can't doubt that it will get worse...) and the younger ones will circle around for the kill