Malfunctioning

I have just spent 10 days with family, which means that pretty much except when I was asleep, I was interacting with people without a break.

What that really means is that there were witnesses to my increasing “brainfog” as I call it.

It’s been kind of easy to hide it at work by simply staying mostly in my cubicle and since I don’t actually have a social life, I haven’t really had to face it outside of work.

But the final straw for me came yesterday when I nearly started crying in frustration when it took me a few minutes to describe what a “clothes rod” was — that long metal tube thing in the closet that you hang clothes on –  to my mother because I couldn’t think of the word “rod” half way through the sentence.  It’s such a simple, every day word and there are so many simple every day words and I’ll be talking along and suddenly it’s as if they’re just gone from my mind, out of reach, vanished.  It’s like walking into a room and forgetting why, except that I do that a hundred times a day with words when I’m writing or talking.  I’ll just be typing or talking or thinking along and just stop in mid-sentence.

And there was my mother trying to guess what word was supposed to come next like it was a game show…what word logically would come next and I’m saying, “no….no…no…” and my tone is getting more and more frustrated as I’m frantically trying to find the word and then trying to find the right words just to describe the simple word I can’t remember — that long metal tube thing in the closet that you hang clothes on.  And I was truly on the verge of tears because I knew this was something everyone knows.  I felt stupid and angry and helpless.
Later that day, when I took my parents to dinner at The Outback for an early celebration of my father’s 65th birthday, they handed me the check and all I had to do was figure out the tip and total and sign my name.  For a math minor and computer science major, someone who wrote computer programs in her head for fun and aced college accounting because she thought it was enjoyable, figuring out the tip and total should take seconds…right?

Except there I was staring at that little piece of white paper with the gray-black print and those four numbers and their decimal in the middle and they just looked like a jumble to me.  I was frustrated again and I tried to explain as I tried to find paper to do the math on.  My CPA father thought it was amusing as he did it in his head, but my mother had the courtesy to say she was starting to be worried about me.

For me, it was kind of a wake up call…having witnesses.  It was scary.

It’s one thing for my body to betray me but my mind is something I’ve always prided myself on.  Thinking about it, I began to realize that these sort of things have been going on a while and getting more and more frequent, but I’ve been trying to ignore them, hide them, pretend everything up there was o.k.
So, after some talk with my doctors this morning, they me for a MRI of my brain next Monday. This of course also means more blood work too.

Tags: MRI of the brain, brainfog, wellness