The Hole in My Head

 

The Hole in My Head

By Craig Willms

 

Note: I started writing this in 2021 when I was 59. I had already made my decision to retire. I started to suspect I was at the beginning stages of some sort of dementia, senility. When I've mentioned my concerns in casual conversation, I've been assured it's just age and to a person they all have stories about how bad their memory is. Fine. Fair enough. This is my warning to my loved ones and friends - it's happening.

Getting old is hell. 

Regardless if the previous statement is true (it is) I’m afraid there’s no getting around it. The fact that modern life expectancy has risen into the 70’s and 80’s for many people is wonderful, but our final years are often fraught with pain and suffering.  It’s the physical self takes the brunt of it, without a doubt, but we’ve all seen people whose bodies betray them, yet are razor sharp right up to the end. What of the rest of us, the ones whose mind goes first?

 I’ve reached sixty years of age and with any luck I should have another 10 or 15 years to live. Enjoying life and experiencing new things without the weight of small children and the daily grind of a job should be looked on with joy. We toil our whole lives for this time, do we not? Yet I peer into the future with trepidation.

 A year or two ago I started to notice that my normal outgoing type-A personality was gone. I noticed it with work first. I had started at new company after 21 years with the previous company. After being on the job a year and half I just wasn’t getting it. By now I should be catching on better… The boss started pushing me to be more engaged, ask questions. I was thinking – I don’t even know which questions need asking. I was able to do rote work, often very technical work without a problem. I could process requests and troubleshoot, but when I was thrust into a stressful situation with dozens of people looking to me for answers I froze. I had done this hundreds of times, knowing just where to look and what to do, but not this time. It really shook me. That my boss was also sitting on the call was a double sting.

 A few months before this particular event I noticed that my head was constantly in a fog. My brain was cloudy. I convinced myself it was due to all the medicine I was taking for the heart, blood pressure and other maladies. I sought out a meeting with a clinical pharmacist and we re-arranged the time of day I took certain pills. It seemed to help a little. Still the problem persisted, it's hard to be sharp and reactionary when your head is foggy.

 Shortly after I started having dizzy spells and then started suffering episodes of double-vision. They were short episodes, but I could not work through them. Thoughts of stroke crept in. I know strokes, and I knew I wasn’t having a stroke. After more than a month of this it was time to see a doctor. I would need and MRI of my head and a good neurologist. What followed was a literal circus show and one mad hombre (me). I ended up in the hospital unnecessarily – but I got the MRI and saw a neurologist.

 I learned that the same thing that ails my heart is affecting my brain. It’s probably not going to get better. It’s likely that the diseases of modernity have claimed me and my days of even knowing myself might be numbered.

I am losing myself – I can feel it. 

Most of us lose a step or become forgetful as we get older. Right. This is more than that. Not being able to think or express the things we know does not happen at sixty, but it is happening with me. I can eventually get there, but sometimes there is no there there. This is not right.

I've read that people with metabolic diseases succumb to some kind of mental illness or mental incapacity many, many times more often than those without metabolic maladies. Those with cardiovascular disease or stroke even more so. I've got the trifecta going. In a moment of clarity, I was able to do an intensive cognitive test to generate a baseline, for all the good it will do me. 

Again, it's coming, or rather it's going. My poor wife doesn't need this. I'll just say this, put me in the "home" when you need to, don't worry about what I or anyone else thinks.