daily detective work

As each day passes and increases the time since I last had to take the chemo, my short-term memory gets better. I know this because my husband gives me a three-random-words memory test every day to check. He gives me the words, and an hour later asks me to remember what they were.

Today my words were salamander, lollipop, and ear. Yesterday I couldn't remember my words, but today they're all still in there.

Because my short term memory has been kaput, I've developed certain strategies for reminding myself of things I'm supposed to be doing at the moment. Short-term memory isn't an issue for my classes, because I've taken special precautions to make sure I have few opportunities to make mistakes. My students' lectures, homework, and tests are all set up in advance through SDSU's online course management system, which stores, dates and timestamps everything for me. It's practically foolproof, and there's always a record of what you've done or haven't done.

When it comes to getting things done in large blocks of unscheduled time, though, using the "puttering around" method of which I am particularly fond, I tend to have a lot of trouble. Being a multi-tasker, I've always liked puttering. Puttering means I can do lots of unconscious mental work while seemingly accomplishing something else. I have always relied on my background thoughts to solve problems for me while I do something else. That way I can do something productive like wipe down the countertops while at the same time accomplishing something less quantifiable, like plotting my next lecture on the Canterbury Tales. Whole projects, grammatical sentences, and complex math solutions have presented themselves to me using this method.

The problem is that puttering is inattentive, automatic, and absent-minded by definition. It's all about short-term memory--and highly unfocused short-term memory, to boot.

So, since I'm seriously committed to puttering as a personal value system and am unwilling to give it up, I've had to come up with puttering management techniques. Some of these have proved more effective than others. Writing reminder notes to myself is fairly effective, though writing notes doesn't always work because then I stick the notes places and forget all about them. Leaving around significant objects is also effective, because when I see, say, a broom lying in the middle of the floor it's pretty hard to miss that some sweeping was being done at the time my task got interrupted.

And so I've come to rely on what I now refer to as detective work. I look around the room for clues that will tell me something about whatever it was I was doing before. Are there vitamin pill containers on the counter? If so, are the lids on or off? If the lids are on, that probably means I was about to take my vitamins and got distracted midstream without taking them. Because I have no short term memory, it is unlikely that I would have replaced the lids after taking the vitamins. I would have forgotten.

So that means I still need to take them.

Looking around and performing focused analyses on the clues is actually a lot of fun. I hadn't been aware before of how many clues about ourselves we leave around for others to form conclusions about. And form conclusions they do. Take my cat, who has already caught on to my tendency not to remember her feeding schedule. So she now screeches for food every time I pass by the cupboard where I store her food, as if to remind me that it's time. Except that usually it isn't, and so it came to pass that sometimes I would end up feeding her as many as five or six times a day.

Until one day I noticed that she had gotten rather fat.

I'm still devastated that my beloved little beastie would take advantage of me like that. What a devious little vixen! But still, this example and others have taught me to become much more aware of all the little clues around us that give us information about just about everything: what has just happened, what happened when we were in the other room, what's likely to happen in another hour or so. Most of this stuff you can figure out just by looking around.

It's a new skill, a skill that depends much more on observation, logic, and analysis, that I'm finding has come to replace the one I no longer have.