Migration

 Jim Dandy started out, really, as an MS blog some years ago, as MS was new to me and something that both fascinated and afflicted me. I suppose that I was learning about the disease while writing about it, making contact with others at the same time and finding a place to air my own grumblings. 

When I moved to Bali, the blog migrated along with me and came to center mostly on my new life here in this 'strange new world'. Interest in the particulars and details of MS, along with their effects on me, faded into the background as I became involved in this new place, new realities, new challenges. I had no interaction with others suffering from the disease, all but unknown in the tropics, nor even with doctors, who, not surprisingly, knew nothing about the disease and whose fee I could not afford in any case. The fact that there is really not much that doctors can do about MS makes this a ideal disease to have in the isolated tropics as one does not feel the need to feel guilty for not taking care of himself. Moreover, it felt just possible in those early days that a change of locale, weather, lifestyle, diet, outlook would would of themselves somehow magically address the disease in a new and more effective way. Wishful thinking? You bet. But in the case of MS, wishful thinking seems as good as any other kind of thinking. 

And now, after ten years here, the blog seems to be shifting to yet another theme, that being senility. It's not that I want to write about senility. It's embarrassing. And yet this blog has always essentially been about me talking to myself--catharsis, introspection, musings. This is what is going on. Nor do I even know what this is. Are the daily mental stumblings I've been experiencing part of cognitive disorder, already firmly associated with MS, or are they a forewarning of something more pernicious and, indeed, more frightening than MS--to whit, the possibility of early Alzheimer's disease? I'm intimately familiar with the latter due to my experience with my mother's mental deterioration and eventual death from the disease and therefore all the more freaked out by the appearance of similar symptoms in myself. An odd mental hiccough here and there is not worrisome, but such hiccoughs are so when they begin to occur on a daily basis. And when articulation has become a problem as well, it is all the more a challenge to speak cogently of the matter. To be cogent about being incoherent, one might say.