Random thoughts on cognitive function…

I am feeling like I'm getting dumber and dumber for the past few of years. I used to be proud of my "steel-trap" memory. Now it's more like a steel sieve. This was one of the reasons that I had to retire from my job so early. I could no longer remember things that I needed to remember in order to do my job more efficiently. It wasn't fair to my staff, my clients, or the company. The missed work days for fatigue didn't help out much either.

One of the benefits of declining cognitive function is that I can watch reruns of my favorite TV shows and not remember how they end. Hey, I have to find something positive in every situation. It helps to alleviate the depression a bit.

When my neurologist confirmed the presence of a "black hole" in my most recent MRI, I was relieved, because I was beginning to think that it was all in my head….Oh, I guess it was.

Please don't get mad at me if I just met you and can't remember your name…it got sucked into that black hole.

I found a poem by Lee Ann Roripaugh that contained a verse that (for me) dealt with cognitive function. I had it printed on my mother's remembrance cards:

Excerpt from "Hope"

I once read the goldfish memory span
was three seconds, and does this mean
each moment is an astonishment
in a series of quick incarnations spiraling
outward the way water ripples away
from a disturbance, so that, in the end,
each brief flicker of awareness
is long enough to learn to simply be,
and isn't this really, after all, enough?

Lee Ann Roripaugh

The nice thing about social networking, is that I can "chat" about current events and I have an outlet to double check the accuracy of my assertions. Virtually every response I post on HuffPost, Facebook, MySpace, Multiply, Blogger, Digg, & Yahoo, is thought out to the best of my abilities and is usually written and re-written several times. I have a lot of typos, so it takes awhile to come up with anything I want to share. (I still catch some typos after the fact). The problem with this is I end up spending way too much time on the computer.