The Queen of Denial

Three times over the past few days I’ve developed an alarming brain fart, I’m calling it. I was sitting with fellow residences and I kept getting their names reversed. For example, I called Diane ‘Linda’ and Linda ‘Diane’ and once I said “hi Tom" knowing full well his name is Jack. (I kind of wish Tom's name really was Jack because Tom is an ass and Jack-the-ass has a better ring to it than Tom-the-ass.) The worry wart in me thinks I could have had a TIA. I had them before back in my 40s before I started getting treated for high blood pressure. 

This time I’ve had no other symptoms of a transient ischemic attack so I’m not hurrying off to the ER where they’d run tests to check for one side weakness, vision problems and slurred speech. They’d spend hundreds of dollars doing brain scans just to say, “Yup, you had a TIA. See that little spot on the film. That’s it.” In my 40s I had 4-5 TIAs before I finally went to the doctor to see why I was having trouble picking up my foot. Ya, I know I should have known the signs back then but no one ever hailed me for being the brightest color in the Crayola box.

One time a neurologist I'd gotten to know pretty well was showing me scans of my husband’s brain and I asked him what happens when someone who is dyslexic and left-handed has a stroke? "Do the neurons that are scrambled since birth un-scramble?” It was a feeble joke and I expected him to give me throw-away joke answer but instead his eyes lite up and he said, “There isn’t much research in that area. It would be an interesting study but hard to get funding for and it would probably turn out that things would just get scrambled more.” Thanks, doc. That’s just what every left-handed, dyslexic person wants to hear.

I do a lot of things to exercise my brain but I do next to zero to exercise my body. There is a woman here who does just the opposite. She says it’s her job to stay healthy and she's out walking in all kinds of weather, takes all the exercise classes on campus. My husband’s cousin who I sat next to at a party in March also took great care to eat right and exercise daily and 2-3 days after I saw her she dropped over dead from a massive stroke. It should have been me. She was thin, had no known medical issues, didn’t even have a piece of birthday cake because “sugar is bad for you.” I consume empty sugar calories nearly every day. I'm far from thin and I sit too much. I say again if you didn't hear me the first time, it should have been me. 

There’s another woman here who is a party machine, always ready for a good time but she constantly talks about how she’s not going to be around in six months. She’s not sick nor does she have a medical condition to base her prediction on. She says that based solely on her age. I finally told her to stop talking that way, that she was going to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.” I truly believe the brain is powerful enough to do that and since we’re all about the same age, I don’t like hearing someone say we’re all on a six-months timer. There are lots of ways to face our own mortality, aren’t there. Denial is my personal favorite.

When we’re young we don’t think of our lives in terms of our own mortality. In truth I never thought about of death at all until my mom died. I was 41 but I never had grandparents to act as training wheels for how to let go of a loved one. I took it hard. Over the next few years I tried to hold on to her by taking up Mom’s genealogy research and with the help of the internet I took it to heights she could not have imagined back in the ‘80s. Then I wrote several books about our family history. If you’re in a history book you’re immortal, right? Or so I thought.

But it doesn’t work that way, does it. Books by average folks fall by the wayside and only the extraordinary stand the test of time. The best we can do to achieve a sort of immortality is to contribute to the pool of goodness in the world and hope together we can keep civilization moving in the right direction toward a better world. A couple of us had that philosophical discussion here at the continuum care complex. It was interesting because we didn’t even agree on how to define “a better world” which is a good indication of how hard it will be to achieve one. Going back to '50s values where anything bad in society was swept into a dark corner was not acceptable to some of us; others thought the openness of talking about the ills of society like we do now only breeds more of the same.

I thought I’d written about immortality back in the days when I was doing my tongue-in-cheek Sunday Sermons but doing a search of my blog I couldn't come up with anything. So I'll leave you with another meme that pretty much sums up the key to finding immortality and points out why I'm so screwed out of any hope of achieving it.  ©