THE MIST IS DESCENDING

Two elderly ladies were enjoying the afternoon sun sharing a park bench in Brighton England. They had been doing this for eleven years and were very close friends. One day the younger one says; "Please don't be angry, but dear oh dear, I'm so embarrassed that I can't remember your name. Can you tell me what it is?" And a tear crept from the corner of her eye. The older one stared at her in a worried way for a couple of minutes. "How soon do you need to know?" She said. Memory loss dementia and alzheimers are no joke, but keeping a sense of humour is essential. In fact it has been proved that keeping a cheery disposition helps tremendously in slowing down the 'enemy.' Other things also help and vitamin E is the current fad in slowing down memory loss, dementia and alzheimers. In my own case I had found that macademia nuts were helping, but last week I had a bad setback. I caught a stomach bug. Now you will think "That's no big deal, everyone catches those from time to time." Well, that's true but this was the bug of bugs and it began in the household with collapse of my son in law who we had to carry to the doctors. We took him back with appropriate medecines and he collapsed on his bed and Julian's daughter took care of him. By the evening my headache of the morning was raging and I was prostrate on my bed and half crawled and half dragged regularly to the lavatory.This went on for two days and when I was no better Julian got friends to carry me to the car and off to the Medi Clinic where I was put on a drip. The Doctor asked me various questions and at first I couldn't remember the answers. They were simple questions such as the name of my Doctor and what medication I was currently on. After a struggle I did remember, but for the first time I felt that under stress my problem of memory loss and dementia was becoming more apparent. Over the week that followed I struggled constantly with problems and another thing that became apparent is not only that my memory is getting worse, but also my reasoning and problem solving abilities are also deteriorating. It was a rough week with about fifty trips to the loo every day. These are bad enough in themselves, but when you have to try and sprint to get to the lavatory in time quite exhausting. As for the gasses produced, my big fear was that someone might use our loo and light a cigarette. Had they done so there would have been a whole in the ground where our house still stands. To sum up. My memory and reasoning processes are getting worse, but I am not yet sure if that was happening at this speed anyway, or if my illness has done so. If the latter it is an interesting point that perhaps overall health plays a big part in memory loss, dementia and ultimately alzheimers. For me though the fog is defnately descending. I will go on fighting and it is interesting that with effort I am able to write this blog. The one good thing that came out of all the medical struggle was that my weight has dropped by six kilos! As my old mum always said; "Every cloud has a silver lining!" David Barnato. Paarl. South Africa. PS Boysie is well and very exciting news, Bobby the parrot has started to speak. Total gibberish but at least it's a start.