written on July 22, 2014
So it seems that I’m starting to suffer another side effect from all this dialysis – short-term memory impairment.
I phrase it that way because it’s not really memory “loss.” Usually whatever it is that I forgot comes back to me after several minutes.
What’s happening is sometimes I’ll think of something I need to do, or something I want to look up on the web (usually something to research pertaining to my current ailments), and I’ll turn a corner in the house and it will just vanish completely from my mind. Most of the time I’ll stand there for several minutes trying to remember what it was that I wanted to do.
I know, this sounds like an all too-common problem, especially as we get older. But seeing as how this “problem” started for me about 4 weeks ago, and days when I dialyze it seems to be worse, I’m thinking it’s directly related. Plus, I’ve always prided myself on my memory. For some reason, I seem to remember a lot of things. Of course I think I’m remembering things objectively instead of subjectively, but as I’ve talked to various family members and friends about their memories of events we shared, I can tell that everyone’s recollection is subjective. Memories of my youth are very vivid in my mind. As I’ve gotten older, a lot of details about life have been lost – but for some reason the details of my childhood still exist. Maybe when you’re younger, your memories imprint easier than when you’re older. Maybe when I hit my 20’s, there were so many things going on in my life remembering the details became less important.
Either way, I think my memory is, for the most part, pretty rock solid. Except for now. Now my short-term thoughts are always at risk of being immediately forgotten. Sometimes I can’t even remember the details of what happened yesterday. I really have to think it through to remember what I did, or what our kids did.
For some people, this is just the way life is. For me, it’s foreign territory, and one I don’t particularly enjoy being in. It creates this fear in me that one day this “memory impairment” is going to start spreading to those long-term memories, or at least encompass longer time spans than just the most recent past.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve definitely come to realize that the memories I have, the things I remember, are so much a part of who I am and who I’ve become. For years I’ve often thought about things I regret, or things I would do differently in my life. I still have a few lingering regrets, but for the most part I try to not live with them.
The decisions I’ve made in my life, whether good or bad, all shaped who I’ve become. They created the path that got me to where I am now. I would love to go back and figure out when my kidney disorder started and try to change that, because who wants to be 40 years old living on dialysis like I am? I know, there are probably millions of people like me around the world (although I have noticed that most people I’ve come across on dialysis don’t have a chronic kidney disease like me – they have some form of diabetes or cardiovascular disease instead – all of which are bad but not as rare as the stupid nephropathy that took my kidneys out). But it’s not a regret; since I don’t know how the disease started, or when, I can’t pinpoint a time in my past when I could have changed something.
Any other regrets I might have I have come to an understanding and just do my best to live with them every day. Most of them involve ways I’ve wronged people in the past and how I would love to apologize for my behavior. One day maybe I’ll write some of those apologies down and hope they are accepted without judgement. I’ve learned to forgive myself for a lot of things I did wrong in my past. It would be nice if the people I wronged would be willing and able to forgive me as well, but that’s really a dream that will most likely never come to pass. And since I’m not reaching out, and not trying to achieve it, it will always live as an unfulfilled hope. I’m okay with that – maybe if this memory impairment gets worse, those things won’t ever bother me again. But that would be even worse I think, because then the things from my past that keep me on my toes in my present might disappear and I might repeat some of the mistakes from years ago. Wouldn’t that be a horrible way to live – repeating past mistakes because you forgot that you made them before?
Wow – I’m realizing that I could go on for pages with this blog entry. So many ideas bouncing around my head in relation to this concept of “memory.”
When I was younger, in junior high and high school, I used to think that one of the worse things that could happen to me would be if people forgot about me. I used to want to make sure that people would always remember me, remember who I was, that maybe I touched their lives in some important way that I’d always be a pleasant reminder of their own pasts. Such a self-centered way to picture yourself in the lives of others.
As I was thinking of what to say in writing this blog, I remembered that little tidbit from my past and it made me think of the word legacy. Legacy, in one definition, is something handed down or received from an ancestor or predecessor (definition from http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/legacy). And yet the word, I think, has come to mean more than that. When you think of someone’s “legacy,” you think of what they’ve left behind, not necessarily what they handed down. As a teenager, I seemed to be very obsessed, in my own private way, with what my legacy would be to the people I knew in high school.
I laugh now, because I realize how much a waste of time that was. I think it grew from the depression that I always fought through high school (a depression I didn’t realize existed until my 30’s, when I went through a massive depression and looked back on life to see when it started). And I laugh because the reality is, who cares? If there’s a legacy I want to leave behind now, it’s something for my kids. It’s hoping that throughout their lives, they think I was a good father, a supportive parent, who, with their mother, created a nurturing and caring environment where they could grow and learn and live with safety and comfort. Yeah, that would be a nice legacy to leave behind. Truth is, we won’t know whether or not we were good parents until it’s way too late for us to change anything. As they eventually grow older, their ideas of whether we were good parents or not may change. By the time they become parents themselves (if they ever do), I know their ideas of whether my wife and I were good parents will change drastically (having kids makes you realize how difficult raising a child really is, in my opinion).
Whether I leave behind a legacy or not is irrelevant to me now. It’s more important to just live in the moment and do the best you can with what you’ve got. Whether anyone else remembers, or cares to remember, just doesn’t matter. It’s like being worried about how you look, or what you say, because you’re afraid other people will judge you as if you’re some kind of performer. Being afraid of other people’s judgment is silly – we are the best we can be at any given moment; what other people think doesn’t matter.
Although, if this memory impairment gets worse, I really won’t care what other people think; because in a few hours or days, I won’t remember it anyway. :-)
Hopefully that won’t happen – it’d be nice to hang on to my memories for as long as I’m around. How else will I be able to bore my kids with tales of how it used to be?