Facebook exchange on the 13th with John Singler about my most recent wave of physical afflictions, with John providing sympathetic commentary. Part of my response:
… yes, I’m a giant compendium of alarming conditions and ailments. … Meanwhile, having tended someone through dementia into death makes me constantly fearful that I am myself slipping away without realizing it.
For some time now, my slogan for my physical travails has come from Monty Python’s Mary, Queen of Scots: NOT DEAD YET! Now thinking of adding NOT DEMENTED YET! — while I search constantly for evidences that I’m still well plugged in (just very, um, odd).
I am abnormally good at counting backward from 100 by 7s, having been through this diagnostic item with Jacques, and some other patients, many times. So that’s of no use.
But on the 14th, Stephanie Smith gave me a chance to show off my chops, with this appeal:
Saturday night at the office because these files won’t resolve themselves and I have anxious comrades to check in with before I take a week off. Send revolutionary vibes.
I got five revolutionary vibes for her, right off the bat, without having to do a search, and immedately posted four of them (discarding “You say you want a revolution / Well, you know / We all want to change the world” [Beatles, White Album, “Revolution”] because it was too unsubtle, actually used the word revolution crucially). Felt clever and thoroughy undementic, or at least not yet dementic.
My four, originally posted without notes or explanations — which I’ve added here, however — in the order they came to me, bing, bing, bang, bang:
Op. 10 No. 12 [Chopin, “Revolutionary Etude”]
Aux armes, citoyens! [“La Marseillaise”, the rallying call to the French Revolution and now the French national anthem]
Number 9. Number 9. [Beatles, White Album, “Revolution 9”]
It will be no re-run brothers / It will be live [Gil Scott Heron, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”, with It for The revolution]
A sixth response — 78, 45, 33⅓ — came to me ten minutes later, but by then the sense of a torrent of ideas was gone.
Note: there’s a Page on this blog of links to material on Jacques. Including two items relevant to his radiation-caused dementia, material in which I serve as a clinical observer:
JHT history (brief medical history)
Notes on JHT and his linguistic abilities: a sampling from 1998-2002
Deep sighs.
September 20, 2019 at 3:33 am |
I share the fears of dementia due to my experience with my mom (and 3/4 grandparents). In any case, the neurologist doing the diagnostic work with her seems to have been aware of the issue of counting backwards from 7 from 100. She told her to count backwards by 7 from 90. Let’s see that 84, 70 something. That’s far enough. See I’m ok.