“As you get older three things happen. The first is your memory goes and I can’t remember the other two” (Norman Wisdom)

 

As you are probably aware, we are in possession of a number of psychological functions.  Two big ones are cognition – thinking; and emotion – feeling.  There are others, including behaviour.  If you’ll forgive me, I’ll leave both emotion and behaviour for later posts and just deal with thinking for now. Both cognition and emotion have been impacted by my injury (so has behaviour, as we will see).

 

So far as cognition is concerned, I guess the biggest one for me is, significant memory loss - both short and long term.  Relating to the longer term there are many very big gaps.  I have very little recollection of my children growing up – I can’t even remember their respective birthdays! Many previous events, such as holidays etc, are a complete blank.  I do have so called islands of memory, whereby I can recall some minor or trivial detail that most would have forgotten.  If I mention such things, others tend to say that “there is nothing wrong with your memory”! I bet those folks can remember their wedding or children starting school – I can’t! As you might imagine, this is all a source of distress.

 

I imagine that short term memory problems contribute to the other main effect on my cognition.  I now find personal organisation – planning and prioritising to be rather difficult (I think the grown-up term for this is “executive dysfunction”) and I have had to develop strategies to alleviate this.  I seek to self-impose a rigorous sense of routine and articulate this in writing.  Doing so is necessary, but having to plan, even the timing and duration of leisure activities can detract from their enjoyment.

 

One of the reasons for such planning is fatigue management. I can easily become psychologically fatigued and becoming so, is detrimental to all my mental activities.  Physical fatigue is relatively easy to spot and remedy – feel tired and have a rest. Mental tiredness, on the other hand tends to sneak up on me and I have a tendency to believe its effects to having been caused by something else (I am good at blaming things on others!).  It is therefore, best dealt with by taking steps in advance to space things out and reduce its impact, accordingly.

 

Overall though, cognition is far less affected by my injury, than is emotion – to say the least. I’ll talk about it in the next post.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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