What happened to my memory – the story

 Last year, I thought I was doomed.

I was in good physical health, but my mind was going.

I recognized that, because my speech was beginning to falter. I began to struggle to find, not just the right word, but the simple descriptive noun to identify the subject I wanted to talk about. And then, the rest of the sentence tended to disappear from my mind as I wrestled with basic vocabulary.

How did I reach such a state?

I’d been caring for my wife, who had gone through this stage and degenerated to the last stage of that stage of Alzheimer’s – for years. Was it actually contagious? Was I, too, coming down with Alzheimer’s? How would I look after her if I couldn’t look after me?

I recognized that I was in trouble, and that trouble extended into deeper recesses of my memory. My verbs began to disappear too. I couldn’t remember events, or whether or not I’d seen this film with my son, or that episode of our favourite drama. When my son reminded me what the episode was about, I recalled much of it.

I resigned myself to the fact that I was suffering from Alzheimer’s, and that I would never get my book out before I became non compis mentis.

Here’s the state I was in:

 What happened to my memory?

What happened to my memory?

Where did it go?

Is it playing hide and seek?

It’s not where I peek.

Things are so slow

To come back to me now.

And no one knows how

To guide me back

To the sentience (sic) I just left…

Memory…

I know I had one…

Y-yesterday…

Where am I now?

Where did I go?

Why can’t I know?

There’s a word for that.

It says where you’re at

It’s a long word, it starts with an…errr…uh…

No, a re-

And it, it ends with a…an…an –er…

It’s re…hmmmm…er

Brr…

What happened to my…er…

You know…

That thing that tells you…

You know…what you…knew

What happened to my…

Memory…

Where did it go?

Rescued

BUT, one day my son threw his arm around my shoulder and said,

“Dad. I’m getting worried about you.”

He reminded me about his best friend’s mother. She had been taking Lipitor, on her doctor’s orders, to lower her bad cholesterol levels. After some years, she began to display signs of early or mild cognitive impairment, a sure sign of the onset of Dementia/Alzheimer’s.

This had shocked her and she stopped taking Lipitor.

She recovered. Fully. This summer she was at a function attended by my son and he reported that she was thriving.

I went to my doctor and told him I was dumping Litipor. After years of following doctor’s orders and filling each and every prescription for the stuff. He said, okay, let’s try that for a year and see how that works.

It’s been more than a year now, and it works just fine. I’m functioning at a pretty high level of competence again.

Lipitor is in the category of statins. Millions of people take them. Millions suffer from Dementia/Alzheimer’s. What, if any, connection there is to that general statistic, I don’t know. I know only my personal experience.

But one of hundreds of stories out there is one by a drug policy researcher at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Alan Cassels.

In an article in the Common Ground magazine of Vancouver, B.C., (and soon available in Toronto and Ottawa in Ontario. www.commonground.ca) entitled New Cholesterol-lowering Drugs Coming, Watch for sleight-of-hand, he acknowledges the possible dangers of such drugs.

“And, of course,” he writes, “they’re not without a range of adverse effects, such as liver damage, muscle weakness, cognitive difficulties, diabetes and other risks.”

I will forever wonder if that’s what caused my Ann’s capture by Alzheimer’s, for she had been on Lipitor for decades.

Confession: I had apparently become subject to another one of those “side effects,” pre-diabetic, over time. How big a role did Lipitor play in that? (Spoiler: I had also “suffered” a lifelong addiction to sweets, desserts, anything sugary.)

At one point they had me on a low to non fat diet. They even had me limited to one tablespoon of margarine. They probably meant per meal, but I was so incensed that I didn’t even finish reading the prescription (proscription?). I took it to mean per day. Either way, Hell, that was downright just plain miserly. I spent months being upset about that.

At another point, I wrote a little screed that went something like this: The doctor said your cholesterol is high, take Lipitor to get the bad guys, the LDL, down. Sounded reasonable. What did we know? What did the doctor know? Responsible writers out there, like Mr. Cassels, make a strong case about drug companies selling superstories to doctors when their sales people hawk their wares.

Why, I wrote, don’t our leaders protect us? Yes we want “cures,” but to let a pill out prematurely, and to have “side effects” like this, and like the Thalidomide affair, surely is criminal. Should heads roll?

It does give pause for thought. Repercussions of the pill on the patients and their families, repercussions on the pill makers.

So, there I am – healthier, no wealthier, but wiser.

Indie Herb

Take care.