Part of the struggle with being epileptic is that memories just disappear sometimes. No warning. No pattern. No rhyme. No reason. No hope of regaining them. They are just gone.
Like a very targeted amnesiac.
This can be infuriating, especially for a person like myself who (used to) pride themselves on having a great memory, and even relied upon this memory for many things in the past – my work, my parenting, my family, my joy, my love life. Everything.
Now my memory has betrayed me. It is just untrustworthy. It has…betrayed me. Sometimes I get very angry at this betrayal. I curse and scream at it. Sometimes I become sullen. I cry uncontrollably, “How could you do this to me?”
At the end of the day, though, I have to figure out how to deal with this new reality, and it is a wild wilderness for me. The way I have live the last thirty plus years of my life no longer apply. I must figure out a new way to operate, because my primary tool is now broken.
Lately I have forgotten some pretty important things. Like calling my step-son on Christmas Day. Like where I put my wife’s other Christmas present I bought her in August, before my seizures started. I have a feeling this won’t go away, so I need a plan, but I don’t have one.
I have only been an adult epileptic for a few months now – this is a new world for me, and one that is a bit frightening for me. Let me pose this question to the ‘veteran epileptics’ out there:
How do you know what you don’t know, what you used to know, and what you should know?
Maybe some sort of diary or log regarding what you are planning, or where you have hidden things. If only you could predict what you might forget. I am praying that God will give you some ideas (wisdom – James).
The predicting is the hard part. I could go all OCD on this and spend all day documenting my life right — haha! I am beginning to think that community is part of the answer, meaning that I don’t live a lot of my life apart from others. That way, I can always recount my life with someone else and retrace my steps as necessary.