On Saturday night, I went to take off my eye make-up and got a couple of those flat cotton pads you use to remove your nail polish.
GUESS WHAT COMES NEXT!
Correct! I absentmindedly reached for the nail polish remover instead of the make-up remover, dampened the pad with it, and rubbed it on my eyelid. I smelled my mistake immediately.
What followed after a bloodcurdling scream was a dramatic episode of eye washing, attended by my poor husband who stood ready to drive to the ER while I whined, “It won’t matter if I’m already blind.” I didn’t want to open my eye to find out, until rinsing my eyelid a few hundred times. Then I poured distilled water in my eye for around 15 minutes. In the end, I was deeply shaken but still fully sighted.
Now I know that I can’t be trusted to do anything involving household products, matches, medications, what else? I’ve known for a while that my hands don’t always know what they’re doing, and I might throw away something valuable if the other hand is holding a used paper towel. It’s gone beyond the state of “not present.” My brain is somewhere else entirely, and often the somewhere else is literally oblivion.
Naturally I feel scared of what’s to come. I went to take that little online test to screen for senility and scored one point less than a couple of years ago. I googled dementia and Alzheimer’s and learned that you need a whole work-up to get a diagnosis. The drugs you’re taking, your levels of vitamin B-something, depression, all these things could be affecting your cognition.
The meds I take can all affect memory, and my sleep deprivation is no joke either. Deep down though, I’m pretty sure I’m losing my mind.
When I can’t use words, it’s going to be unbearable, unless I forget that I love words. I guess that could work out. But surely I’ll know if I can’t think of common nouns or the names of my loved ones. The other day, I couldn’t remember Anderson Cooper’s name. It took forever to retrieve it. Right now I can remember Steve Mnuchin and Mike Pompeo, but I just forgot the name of Rev Al Sharpton. Do I need these names, one might ask, and the answer is yes! I need to remember everything I know!
If only we could selectively control our memory files, deleting Taylor Swift stuff to make room for new passwords. I want to hang on to all adjectives! Laying in bed this morning (unless it’s lying in bed, I CAN’T REMEMBER) I couldn’t think of the word “transcend”. It’s not as dire as putting nail polish remover on your eye but still, it’s upsetting.
Many years ago, I predicted the advent of nursing homes for baby-boomers, where music of the 60s would be piped in all day long. There would be a chain of these facilities called “Summer of Love”, where residents would know all the lyrics of every Dylan and Beatles song, even if they couldn’t recall their own names. Just as every cynical joke about the future has now become a grim reality, there are already nursing homes and elderly day-care centers that try to create a bygone era for the comfort of the residents. They use facades of 50s diners or 40’s gas stations, and set up fake little bus benches for people to congregate around. To me, this is gas-lighting, but to the companies behind this business model, it’s a useful way to control behavior.
Now that it’s just around the corner for me, please don’t put me somewhere where they play Eric Clapton or the Eagles! In fact, once my hair stops looking good, I’d like someone to kill me, swiftly and humanely, with a heavy frying pan.
Do any of you have a bottom line for “quality of life” or do you look forward to hiking well into your 90s, bragging about your Boniva and reverse mortgages?
The apocalypse? A bonfire?
