As I get older, I find that I am not as sharp as I once was. I forget where I put things. I forget lyrics and verses that I thought I could never forget. I will be driving down a road or a route that I traveled often but it no longer looks as familiar to me, and I get a little lost. People tell me that it is because I have a lot going on, or that I am just distracted and not giving my full attention to what is going on. At only 45, I tell myself this too, but the phantom is in my head and I am afraid.
My grandmother had dementia. She was not a pleasantly confused, little sweet white-haired granny that you might envision. She wasn't going down without a fight, and now I realize that she was probably aware that she was losing her mind and terrified. She would imagine that people were trying to break into her home at night, and would bar herself inside her mobile home by wedging chairs under the doorknobs. She was sharp enough at this time to put flour under the windows and by the doors to catch the perps leaving footprints, but there were never any there. Once, she was put into the hospital for altered mental status and they put her on the heart unit because she was having stroke-like symptoms. They moved her quickly to geri-psyche because she was going room to room, looking for her gun so she could shoot the man that put her in that hospital. It was kind of amusing then, but I don't find it as funny now. She was scared of the phantom in her mind.
My mother was always afraid she would go down that same path. She was getting a little forgetful as the years went by, and her moods would fluctuate a great deal sometimes. I think as she was nearing the end of her life, her memory was getting worse also. Her greatest fear was that she would get as bad as her mother and sister, and I think God honored her by not allowing her to find out how bad it would get. I miss her terribly, but I am glad she was rescued at a younger age from the phantom that was trying to get her.
I am trying to be the best person I know how to be, with the help of the Bible and prayer. I am currently in school getting my bachelor's degree and may go on to higher learning. I do want to be accomplished, but in the back of my mind I am trying hard to stimulate the neurons in my brain to put up a defense to dementia. I am trying to find something interesting for my hands to do to stay busy, so that if dementia happens to me I can have enough muscle memory to stay busy doing something. Dementia patients that are productive are generally happier, and if I am learning something new as often as I can then it should help something. Every time I forget something, there is that little thought in my mind that I am going to lose it. A phantom is defined as a figment of the imagination, a delusion (also as a ghost, but those don't bother me as bad as this). I hope this all turns out to be nothing more than a phantom.
