Monday, September 13, 2010

Yes, still out here

Still here, but I don't have much of a life to blog about these days.

Sharing medical stuff just isn't appropriate (especially when it's about someone else's medical conditions). And I posted the E.R. visit two weeks ago on Facebook, so that's old news now.

Plus someone gets up and looks over my shoulder to see what I'm up to, so that's, um, awkward. Right on cue, he just walked in!

I thought I'd diverse into the weirdness of the brain. Weirdness = not the right word. Peculiarities perhaps. Anyway, I was doing some research on dementia and was reminded how hard the brain works, and how miraculous it is that we function at all. One article explained that the brain is very good at filling in the blanks, like we might do if we're working a crossword puzzle. If a dementia patient knows (or thinks they know) the front and back end of a story, the brain will fill in the rest of the blanks. So that is why the rest of the family members are bewildered when the loved one, very confidently, comes up with the most bizarre series of events in discussions. It can be frustrating to try to understand, "Why is my husband/father lying to us" when in fact they are just relating the story their brain is telling them.

The root words of dementia mean "without mind." De=without, ment=mind.

So ... if you use the above pieces of information to fill in the status of my life, have you come up with a truth? Or a possible truth that just happens to fit the blanks? Hmmm. Maybe I was making up the whole thing because I didn't blog at all in August, and this fills in a blank for September. Or maybe it's just late (for me, yes, 9:30 is late) and I need to shut down the whole brain thing for a while.