Yesterday was my birthday (Sunday, March 13). Birthdays have never really been a big deal for me. I've even had a year in which I completely forgot it was my birthday. But the birthday of 2011 got a shitload of meaning latched onto it.
It was the night my mother suffered a bout of memory loss for about an hour. I'd never experienced such an upsetting degree of terror in my life. If there's anyone who cares about my birthday, it's my mom. And she couldn't remember it for that hour.
My head swirled with thoughts of my family, our future, my friends, dementia (particularly Alzheimer's), portrayals of such memory conditions in Friday Night Lights and Memento, as my dad, younger brother, and I tried to calm her down and ask her questions. Her recollection of information was spotty and random. She knew who we were and she knew what house we were in, but she couldn't remember what she had been doing. She looked lost and confused.
Every time she asked, "What was I doing just now?" (and she asked it repeatedly every other minute) was like a stab in the heart. And yet I felt numb with fear at the same time. We ended up calling the paramedics because my brother was afraid that it could be the onset of a stroke. As she sat on the couch trying desperately to gather her surroundings, she gradually began to panic. Tears, chills, and increased rate of breathing... it only got worse when the paramedics came.
They had to strap her to a chair to wheel her down the stairs to the front door. She sobbed all the way down, calling for her own mother (who has long since passed away; I never knew her).
The paramedics informed me that she was fine physically, and that he believed she may have reacted to a sudden surge of stress or trauma mentally.
My brother rode with her in the ambulance. My dad and I followed in my car. I dropped him off at the trauma center door and went to find parking. By the time I got to room #105, she seemed to be doing ok. She was starting to remember what she had been doing surrounding the time that she seemed to have gone 'out of time.'
We began to piece together the chronology as best we could. She had been on the phone with her oldest sister (my mom was the youngest in a large family), and it seems as if some bad memories were brought up. Stuff we'd never (not even my dad) known. Really traumatic, but evocative stuff. One of her brothers was shipping off to the army. Images of trains whooshing by. Her evil stepmother (her father's 2nd marriage) taking away the stereo she loved to listen to. Her father stomping on her to punish her for objecting. Her starving in that household, while the older siblings who went off to raise their own families ate well.
She cried several times while digging all that stuff up again. It seems as if it was all memories that she could never really bring up to her sisters because: 1) she had always been in silent reverence of her oldest sister and wasn't one to openly vent about such things... and 2) her siblings weren't there to see any of that abuse for themselves.
When she brought up references to this event to her sister and started to get noticeably irritated, her sister told her to calm down... which is NEVER, EVER something you want to tell someone unless you're TRYING to piss them off.
I guess they transitioned into another topic and eventually ended the conversation. And that was when she started to go from my brother's room to my dad, asking what she had just been doing. I was downstairs taking a nap until my brother told me there was something wrong.
She seems to be doing OK. She's been able to gradually gather pieces of what she had been doing before and after her 'out of time' experience, though she still can't remember anything from within that moment. I would imagine that it's trying to recall a feint dream. The social worker, who we explained all of the above to, said that as the first such incident, it's too soon to say if this could be the signs of dementia or Alzheimer's.
And that is my greatest fear. From now on, it's going to be something that lingers in the back of my family's mind. But otherwise, the doctor confirmed what the paramedics said about her physical health.
Anyway, like the incident of the armed robbery at our store, this is just my way of typing it all out to try to make sense of everything for myself, since I'm soooooooo comfortable here. It helped then, and it helps now.
And to get down to the cliches, it's another moment for me to remember how fragile it all is. The armed robbery, Renn's recent family tragedy, and this... just like that. So let's cherish it, yeah?
Edited by mcnooj82 - 3/14/11 at 9:16pm
