Memories

JON: I’ve been meaning to write about my memory problems – but I keep forgetting. OK, when you have picked yourself off the floor laughing, try to imagine what it’s like to have no recollection of the recent past. It can make you quite paranoid at times – having no recollection of what happened last week, and no idea what plans have been laid for this week. And people (well, Marie) keep claiming that I have participated in discussions and agreed to sweeping decisions of which I have absolutely no recollection.

As a practical example: it was Marie’s birthday a few days ago. I had bought her a pendant in the shape of a string of DNA (you know: a bit of double helix – which happens to be the symbol adopted by Brights (born-again atheists)). Actually, when I say “I bought”, I actually mean she scoured the web for a version she liked, then ordered it and paid for it on my credit card – but it was my idea! It arrived in the post weeks ago and I hid it away somewhere safe.

After being prompted the night before, I managed to remember the birthday the next morning, but despite extensive poking around the deep recesses of my memory: could I remember where I hid the pendant? Not a chance, absolutely no recollection at all. Fortunately Marie had spotted it herself, hidden in plain view on a shelf in the garage, so was able to guide me to the bag – though I was still not one hundred percent sure of the contents when I gave it to her.

MARIE: We last wrote about memory issues in the post from 28 June, when the Parkinson Centre neurologist had just explained to us that Jon’s problems with remembering things were most likely related not to his memory going bad but to issues with paying attention. As I understand it, this is caused by an unfortunate interplay of two common symptoms. One is the erosion of ‘automatic’ patterns of movement so, for instance, unlocking a door or getting into a car is no longer something that happens with mindless ease, but something that must be planned and broken into its constituent parts of small, separate movements that can be done in sequence rather than simultaneously. The other is difficulty with multi-tasking, which means that Parkinsonians really do find it difficult to walk and chew gum at the same time.

What it boils down to is that Jon is easily distracted by the need to focus his attention on small physical tasks and thus does not pay sufficient attention to what goes on around him to be able to store it in memory. Even during dinner, where one might think he would be able to zero in on a discussion of next week’s programme, he may instead be grappling with the difficult wrist-twisting movements necessary to load a fork with spaghetti, or could be concentrating on chewing his food without biting his tongue, or planning how to reach for the pepper grinder.

This is a bloody nuisance, and a rather unexpected one. We obviously know better than to equate Parkinson’s with shaking (in fact, Jon has very little tremor), but much of what we heard and read initially about the disease lead us to think of it as a movement disorder with stiffness, slowness, etc. (of which Jon has much). It is becoming clear now that this is far from the full story. The movement issues may be more noticeable at first, but with them come a slew of related effects on mood and mentition – which may, for someone as sedentary as Jon, turn out to be the more troublesome symptoms.

Jon’s social life (and by extension, mine too) is also much affected by the disease, but that is a subject for another post – soon.