honesty is a virtue, apparently

I'm starting to think very seriously about memory, what makes short-term into long-term memory, and generally how to find a work-around for the problem of not being able to follow through on much of anything, simply because I don't remember whatever it was I was supposed to be doing to begin with.

I knew I had problems with short term memory already. Big problems. And I've been treating my memory problems as something of a joke--i.e. when my mom would call and say, "Can you sign that permission slip for Madeleine's field trip today," I'd laugh and say, "You know that's just not going to happen. I'm just saying, just so you know, you know."

Because I knew that as soon as I set down the phone and trotted downstairs, the thought would have abandoned me and the paper wouldn't get signed, because that's what it means to have short term memory loss.

I didn't think this was so funny when I went to see a specialist in brain tumors up at the UCLA neurocenter yesterday, however. I've been telling my doctors I had short-term memory problems for some time, but it never seemed to register with them what that really means. This doctor yesterday, though, immediately did a little test. He said, "I'm going to give you four words to remember. And then after the examination I want you to repeat them back to me."

And as soon as he said that, I thought, oh shit.

So he said to me, slowly and clearly, that the four words were ball, honesty, dog, and something else I can't remember (I told you! You see I am not making these things up!). He asked me to repeat them back to him, and I did. All was fine. Then he started talking to me about a different topic before coming back to the list.

And by that time I had forgotten it. The whole thing. I couldn't remember the four words he had spoken--not even with help.

"The first one is a toy," he said.

Nada. Nor did his next hint help me, either.

"The next one is a virtue," he said.

I ran through a standard list of virtues in my mind, but honesty wasn't among them. I had to tell him I didn't know.

So that's what short-term memory loss means. It doesn't mean you can't remember a few of the things that happened to you before your brain tumor appeared. It means you can't remember what just happened to you, ever, on a pretty continual basis--unless you take special precautions to do the things that shift items from short-term to long-term memory banks.

No one had done any of these tests with me before yesterday. And, even though I knew the issues were there, there's something very dispiriting about having your condition confirmed by a medical specialist. So even though I already knew about the problem, I was more than willing to believe my friends and family who would reassure me with "Oh, that's normal! I do that all the time!"

Yeah, well, sure: I used to forget things all the time, too, but this is a substantially different phenomenon, and it's depressing to have it sink in that you're pretty much always going to feel disoriented and as if you've just forgotten something important from now on. The probable truth is, you have just forgotten something important.

But at the same time I keep reminding myself how important it is to acknowledge the range of your own abilities, and especially to know what it is you can't do. In cold, hard, realistic terms. I could get off on an entirely different tangent at this point about how this is what is wrong with education today: it's all about telling kids how great they are rather than just saying kindly, "Tommy, you're going to have to work a lot harder than Timmy because Timmy's got a talent for math and you don't, and there's nothing wrong with that, but you need to recognize it and work with it." This is what I tell myself every day and I'm frankly okay with that. Still, it kind of bothers me (REALLY bothers me) that in layman's terms, I'm just not as smart as I used to be. Short-term memory tests are a part of every standard IQ test, and my short-term memory ain't there--ergo I'm not quite as smart as I was. But on the other hand, facts are just simple facts with no bias or innate qualities about them; it's what you do with the facts that matters.

I will say for myself that my analytical abilities are still chirping away earnestly. I love the way that doctor categorized honesty as a virtue. I thought about the philosophical and cognitive meaning of that word all day after my appointment. I kept wondering whether that was his own category or whether this was a standard test neuroscientists give, complete with the handy hints. Did he pull out those random words himself, just for that test? Because they were really good ones. And if you guess each word correctly after the handy hints about how we categorize them, what does that tell the doctor about the patient's neural damage?

And, because of that test, I have a very good sense now of what the damage to my brain is. It's possible the damage done by the tumor will repair over time, or that my brain will find new pathways around the damaged areas. Examples of this phenomenon are well-documented. In the mean time, I have a pretty good sense now of how this damage will continue to affect me, but also--hopefully--how to work around it.

postscript: apparently there weren't four words to remember. My husband, who attended my appointment with me, informs me there were only three.

No wonder I couldn't remember that last one!