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Friday, June 19, 2009

The Curse is Spreading


Another confusing day. Is it Tuesday? No, it's Thursday. OMG the curse is spreading!

One key to the problem seems to be interruption of routine. Summer, therefore, is a problem, for the first familiar routine of the day hinges on the task of taking my son to school, dropping him off (at the right school, one hopes, though this is certainly not guaranteed), and then driving over to the nearby Starbucks for the morning stint at blogging.

The removal of school from the daily schedule proves highly perplexing. It is a destabilizing element.

There are of course other unpredictable interruptions that also destabilize. Say, for instance, my wife has an errand for me to do--go to the bank, buy something at the store, or what have you. Or perhaps I myself have an appointment--doctor, dentist, a meeting for work. Peripheral demands such as these require the application of attention to detail, to time, to location, to the specific nature of the tasks to be accomplished.

The effort of attention instantly taxes the MS brain. It calls upon reserves that do not exist. Confusion sets in, and things begin to go wrong. You show up at the bank without the money. You show up at the store with a pocket full of deposit slips. You forget the dentist.

You stop at Starbucks and sit with your cappuccino, trying to gather yourself together, trying to remember what you're supposed to be doing. You remember an errand, and yet now you cannot find the car.

It used to be that my dog, Norman (God rest his soul) would follow me wherever I went, even if it was just from one room to another. I guess he was confident that I knew what I was doing, and so he followed.

Now it is Smoky who leads me. When I get up in the morning he goes before me down the hallway to the bathroom. He stops by the door and pokes his nose in. After that he leads me to the kitchen, where I will put on water for coffee.

It seems that my cognitive problems are obvious even to a dog.

Coco the Chihuahua, on the other hand, would just as soon lick me as bite me, and does not care a fig about my well being. Coco follows my wife, his mother--apparently perceptive enough to know a fully functioning person when he sees one.

I don't blame him. Nothing wrong with good reasoning.

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