Dementia

A small but significant milestone this week.

I have the beginnings of dementia, and I feel it creeping on. So far, though, people have not seemed to notice it.

This week my daughter rang and during the conversation she asked my wife what was wrong with me, and why do I keep telling her the same things over and over.... 

What was wrong with me. It was the first time that that question has come up, and it did feel slightly distressing for a while.

So what's the progress, and how far up the slope am I ?

Oddly, I might be the last one to ask. Of course I know that I repeat things, and people who know me well are very aware of that. But I am not aware of specific things that I repeat: if I was, I would not repeat them. So there is an element of an incipient lack of self-awareness, and that could make me a very unreliable witness.

So what's the state of play ?

• Things I have written often seem fresh on re-reading, largely because I have forgotten writing them. It often feels as if someone else has written them.
• Reading for pleasure is over as it is so tough to remember what I have read.
• Hard also to commit music to memory, though that was always very easy in the past.
• The deep past is still very vivid: it is only more recent memories which have faded to inaccessibility.
• My vocabulary is shrinking and I am losing words. I understand words fine (at the moment) but often fail to find the word I want to use. 
• My sleeping pattern is pretty disrupted which I think is part of the problem. 
• It's just hard to lay down new memories, even of things that matter to me. Somehow they won't stick. They are there, as prompts can bring them back, while spontaneous recall is sometimes not possible. It's clear that there are memories there which I can just not get easy access to. They can pop up randomly.

Right now, the way I function isn't too much affected. (I think !) I am still making stuff and do not find that difficult. Still cycling, though more slowly (Oh dear !). Still playing music, though I find that accuracy is slipping a bit. 

Maybe the trickiest thing is trying to construct last week. Even with notes that's a little difficult. I suppose that this makes me a little more mellow and relaxed because there is much less to worry about, but it takes discipline not to be distressed by it. I am more aware than before of living in a permanent present. I have always done that, but the sense of present has always been thick, in that 'present' seemed to include now and a chunk of past and future which accompanied the now part. 

The present where I live now is shrinking, with less of the accompanying past and future. It is shrinking like drying wood, and the cracks are beginning to show.

I think the cat lives in this kind of thin present.

I want to try to set down progress here and right now have a kind of interested detachment as a participant observer. That's why the perceptions seem worth noting. I do not feel sorry for myself at all: this is just part of living, after all, so that would be plain daft. If that sort of emotional cancer creeps in, I will stop writing about it.

If you notice this beginning, tell me.