The more things change, the less they seem like they were...


Small update for any stray readers of this blog. I feel like I am approaching the far end of the MCI period. For better or worse, thanks to the quirks of LBD I am still able to write in this blog and sound OK BUT the way the progression is going, in the beginning I was semi-normal most hours of the day with a few hours of heavy dementia sprinkled in. Years go by and its about 50/50: half the time I am semi-normal and half the time I was a drooling idiot, barely capable of understanding Mario Bros.

Now? Things have reached a point where the hours of clarity of the exception and not the rule. I get 1-3 hours of usefulness a few times per day, the rest of the time I am so fogged I cannot play games or understand TV or movies. I do alot of sitting.

I have also mentioned being detached from time; I haven't used a watch in months and a 24 hour day is a pretty useless concept to me. In fact the only useful measure of time for me is the calendar month. Anything less is like anyone else measuring things in their day in milliseconds (1/1000th of a second)...the resolution of the time is just too fine to be useful to a human being. Well, the 24 hour day is like that for me now and has been for a while. Minutes, hours, even days go by so fast now that I need a larger-scoped method of measuring time, so since its all I have, I use a calendar. Can't explain this better, wish I could but many things about the inside view of dementia defy the English language to adequately describe. But I am definitely no longer a part of the normal time-stream; hell I can barely see it in the distance....

My spoken word is getting pretty bad, the aphasia I mean....now I am stumbling over simpler and simpler things, and under less and less stressful situations, what it used to take to trigger my aphasia a year ago.

I think the worst thing I am fighting right now is the semi-frequent flushes of my working memory. Thats short term, "recent" memory that has not yet been committed to long-term memory. Things like where are the car keys, what I am talking about, hell what I am even doing from one minute to the next, in a flash its all gone, flushed from my system as if it never was there. And I mean this is near-total.....I have been in the act of standing up and half-way there forgot I was standing up, let alone for what purpose so until I recall why this is, I just stand there in a crooked position. So many things are impacted by this but as far as the reader is concerned, this makes writing anything longer than a joke a very very time-consuming process...so authoring anything of substance is now taking 10x the time and energy it did even 6 months ago....I keep doing it because I know not what else to do...but the readers should be both patient with my output and understanding of the worsening aphasia, meaning there will be slip-ups that no spell check will catch......

Compounding this all, I have not had access to the really effective dementia medicine, the 18:1 oil in quite some time. I have been negotiations with a local (to NV) company that has the oil but getting it to me and other logistical hurdles are slowing things to a freaking halt....if/once I get that oil however things will likely change........

peace
jeff

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