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The small steps, the small worries [1]

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Date: 2023-02-19  

Penelope’s pause spoke volumes. She asked me if the person was someone we knew in common, and I told her point-blank that I felt I wasn’t ready to tell her. I knew that if I told her that I couldn’t remember the name of our middle school principal, she really would worry.

“Who cares about a middle school principal?” you might say. Well, since elementary, I’d known all of my principals on a face-to-face basis (first name when they addressed me but I addressed them with an honorific, of course). In middle school, not only did I interact with the office staff as part of my duties as a library aide, by eighth grade I was working in the office myself. Of course I knew my middle school principal’s name. Or I should have.

Also, my brother who’d stopped by a couple of weeks earlier had brought up the name in conversation. I kept trying to use that shortcut to get to the name sooner, but that might have been the sticking point altogether—I may have been using a path that may or may not have already been compromised.

Another thing I hadn’t told Penelope I held back for good reason. She and I are not directly related, but we have cousins in common (obviously some ties through marriage). One of these cousins, Bridget, is someone I grew up playing with nearly every summer. We’d fallen out of touch as we grew older, but that doesn’t negate that I know who she is.

Bridget had shown up, as had I, to pay respects to Penelope’s father, who’d passed away after a long struggle with the aftermath of a stroke decades earlier. There was also swift dementia at the end. Now, it’s true that many people (unfortunately, not all) at the funeral were wearing masks, so that may have played a role in what I did or did not see, but it was clear that as I was moving past someone she took exception and grabbed my sleeve as we were about to file past.

“I know you’re not going to go without saying hi to your cousin!” Bridget said. Being stopped so, I was taken aback. I looked again, and I still didn’t recognize her. I reached for a generic script for meeting people whose name you can’t quite place. Not a great script for someone you’ve known for years. Eventually I found a seat (away from non-masked persons) and tried to integrate what had (or had not) just happened.

At the same gathering, another mutual friend came to show her respects. All through middle and high school, the three of us—Penelope, Hera, and myself—were the tightest trio. We grew up within around a square mile of each other, which meant that we hung out even when we weren’t at school, something I could not say for the majority of my schoolmates who lived in a completely different town many miles away. It was so good to see Hera again. I could recognize her clearly.

However, what happened after that was curious. We’d exchanged contact information after the service, and we’d both started heading out. Now, this funeral home is situated between two adjoining parking lots, and when you go through the doors, whichever entrance that happens to be, you go forward and you’re at the juncture of a T. It’s pretty simple. While there are some side paths for, say, various washrooms and administrative offices, the floorplan is straightforward.

Well, while my family and I had arrived and parked on one side of the funeral home, Hera had parked on the other. Without a second thought, I followed her out to that side of the building.

It’s a T.

She reminded me that there were two parking lots, and we kind of laughed it off. I went back inside and thought about being more forthcoming to my cousin whose memory my mind had effaced, but I didn’t know what to say, so I just left.

Those things happened in late May. I had suspected that I may have caught Covid back in April, a relatively mild case, when one of my nieces needed to stay several nights in a row. She’d been sick, sneezing constantly; and I tried to give her space, but there’s only so much of that one can do with a child (pre-teenager)—especially in an apartment where space is at a premium.

I mention April, but the timeline is varied and disjointed. There’s a lot of prior history, too, that certainly may come to bear once the whole story is told, but I’m actually trying to make a long story short. I keep coming back to April as a preliminary date because after I caught whatever it was, I was ill for about a week, with the strangest lingering sense of distance I’d ever felt. People want to call it “brain fog”—that’s such a vague and almost alienating term, in my opinion, because it doesn’t capture what all is going on. I told Penelope that I felt like I’d become Blanket Jackson, walking around with gauze on my face all the time, except it wasn’t my face but my mind.

So I had confessed the problem of not being able to recall a person’s name (but I had kept that exact information from Penelope, because I knew she would worry). I told her that I was going to keep it in mind but hold it in abeyance and see what happens in a year. Maybe I’d go to the doctor about it then. I thanked her for listening to me.

Had I not gotten sick at the end of July, I never would have mentioned anything.

When I go back to the illness I suffered, I generally say it hit me in August. I know exactly when I caught it, as I was with family celebrating my sister’s birthday and my nephew Theodore, who’d scooched onto my lap as I sat in a rocking chair, sneezed right in my face. Smiled, too.

So I have the date affixed as to when this probably really started in earnest: the tail end of July, but the effects didn’t hit for a handful of days later. At first, I wanted to disregard the fiberglass/steel wool feeling extending down the left side of my throat. I’d never quite felt that sensation before, but all I could hope was that Theodore had something other than Covid.

By the time I admitted to myself I must be sick–I, erroneously or not–surmised that the test kit we had may not give an accurate response. I was concerned of a false negative, not a false positive, at that point, as five days had elapsed. Feeling it was more important to save the kit for another brush or close call, I left it for next time. It’s still in the household.

Whatever bug it was—and I’m going to assume in retrospect that it was Covid, considering how serious my ‘sickness behaviors’ were, such as being sucked into slumber—it lasted a week for the most debilitating symptoms, and then it limped along for another two weeks. I was not in a haze at the time, but looking back there’s kind of a haze attached to the memory.

In those three or so weeks, I noticed two symptoms that had never appeared before: I was having trouble with some procedural math (i.e., operations)—but I could still interpret and understand higher, more abstract math (symbolic math: algebra, trigonometry, discrete math, etc). Also, I’d begun to perform what’s known as palilalia, a kind of verbal repetition. Echolalia, a related condition, is where someone repeats exactly what someone else is saying, a common enough ability—children must use this or some similar mechanism when they are acquiring language. Well, palilalia is like that, but you’re repeating your own last sentence/phrase/sound. This type of thing had always stuck out to me whenever I encountered people out in the real world who’d do this. It alarmed me to no end that I now had something like that and had little input on when it manifested.

And sequencing. It became obvious that I was having rather specific problems with framing of sentences. This was especially noticeable and disturbing to me, as I think in sound and so have always had ease and facility with the inherent shaping of sentences. When I was my niece’s age, I read a grammar textbook for fun; as a child, I read the dictionary. So to see these errors emerge in my speech was a warning I had to heed. Sometimes my tenses wouldn’t match. Often, I’d still be “composing” the sentence before “deciding” how the sentence should or could end, so by the time I got there I still had to expend effort on getting the sentence to close. There was a little bit of tongue-tiedness, too.

I had to tell someone. No matter how much I wanted to sweep this under the rug, no matter how utterly embarrassing this was to admit, as humbling as it was, I had to tell.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/19/2153839/-The-small-steps-the-small-worries

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