Who stole my nouns? OR Why I can never go to that gas station again!

I have a couple friends who are dealing with some scary medical issues right now. I worry about them, and make sure to remember them in my prayers everyday, but more than that I can sympathize. When one of my friends was talking about having a “Swiss cheese memory,” it forced me to remember when I went through a very similar ordeal. A couple of years ago I got extremely sick. The kind of sick where they told the fireman to call my family kind of sick. One of the things that was happening was that my hypothalamus (the part of the brain that controls body temperature) was seriously out of whack from an infection. I had a fever that was ranging from 104º to 106°. The brain is very sensitive to temperature and inter-cranial pressure, and when the balance is upset the electrical charges (that control everything our bodies do) can start to misfire. This can result in death, stroke or in my case, seizures.

When the fireman and I were talking about my friend the other day, I made a comment to the effect that I felt bad she was having to cope with the memory issues, because I could remember when I was dealing with it, and how stressful it was when I would get a little confused. The fireman, who remembers my time of “a little confused," slightly differently, snorted and said, “Honey, I was there. You weren't a little confused. You went to the land of bat-shit crazy. And when you got there, they elected you their queen!”

He's right, of course. I was all sorts of not right. Fortunately I don't remember calling the district attorney (whom I had a professional, working relationship with), at home, at 3 in the morning, demanding that he arrest the vampires who had just assaulted me. That caused them to take my phone away and when the lab techs came to draw blood they always alerted the nurses after that. The infection in my leg had caused it to swell, and it looked like I was trying to smuggle a watermelon in my calf. I have a mole on the inside of my leg, about two inches above my ankle. I have had it all my life. I have the vaguest recollection of thinking that the mole was some type of a plug, and that if I could just get it out, all the icky would be able to drain out and I would feel fine. When the nurses found me, I hadn't managed to get the plug out, but I had managed to dig a giant, bloody hole in my leg that required stitches to close. They tied my hands to the bed after that.

That was some of the serious crazy stuff. The less serious, but more lasting effect from the seizures was the Swiss cheese memory that my friend had complained about. I lost days and hours at a time. Some have come back, some are gone forever. I would forget stupid things, and important things. I remember holding my hair dryer one morning and bursting into tears because I had no idea how to turn it on. A couple weeks after getting released from the hospital I drove myself to a doctor's appointment. I got there fine, and got part of the way back home, and then some switch flipped in my noggin, and I got lost. I drove around what I knew had to be close to my house, but I just couldn't find it. I finally had to call the fireman to come and rescue me. He did, and I was 3 miles from the house, where I had lived for years, but I might just as well have been on Mars.

The worst, and the most lasting for me, was that I would lose my nouns. I would be talking just like normal, and all of a sudden I wouldn't be able to find the right word. It's not a “...it's on the tip of my tongue” kind of feeling, it's like the word was deleted from my vocabulary. And it was always the nouns. It's actually a recognized speech disorder, called agrammatic aphasia. It's annoying as hell. It's gotten better with therapy and time, but it's not gone completely, and I suspect I will have it, to some degree, for the rest of my life. Sometimes this leads to very embarrassing situations.

If you've known me for any length of time, you know that I occasionally find myself in situations that could best be described as awkward. This is the one that takes the cake. This is my most embarrassing moment. And, that's saying a lot.

There is a gas station in northern Wisconsin that I can never go back to. It's a very nice gas station, a full array of all things quick and convenient, but I'm pretty sure that they have a surveillance tape of me that they show annually at their Christmas party as the entertainment portion of the evening.

I had been driving along, and had a bit of a tickle in my throat. Not a cough or a sore throat, just an annoyance. So I thought I would stop and get a soda and some hard candies, butterscotch or peppermint would be the preferred choice, but really, anything that you would find in the bottom of an old lady's purse would do. I found my soda right away, but after wandering every aisle, I could not locate any acceptable candy. I made my way to the counter, which was staffed that day by a gentleman of at least 7ts5. He had snazzy rainbow suspenders holding his black uniform pants up to arm pit level. You know the look. While he rang up my soda he asked if that was all, and I meant to respond with something like, “I couldn't find any hard candy, do you have any?” That was not what came out of my mouth. While the response was being composed in my head, the sneaky aphasia bandit came and stole me nouns! What actually came out of my mouth was, “Do you have anything hard? I need something to suck on.”

His jaw dropped lower than his suspenders! Me, being me, tried to make it better. Instead I added to the steaming pile of embarrassment by saying, “I have a tickle in my throat, and I need something to sooth it.”

So, to my dear friends who are facing some challenges right now I say this: It's okay if you feel like you have gone bat-shit crazy. I am the queen there, and will happily make you one of my ladies in waiting.