Sunday, May 20, 2007

Scary

Last night I had a rather scary few hours. I have been reading many books in the last few weeks as a prelude to judging them. I read fairly fast, but due to the amount of time I spend online I no longer read 3 to 5 books a day -- I am down to one or fewer. Yes, I now take several days to finish a book. Such a slacker!

In any case, last night I was reviewing the ones I need to judge, when I suddenly realized that I could not remember anything about the one I had most recently completed except for its title and author. No clue to the plot. Not one character name. No themes. No nothing.

I am terrified of getting Alzheimer's. It is altogether possible that I will live more than another 30 years, and I would hate to lose my mind even 25 years into that span. One of my relatives had either Alzheimer's or some other form of senile dementia. I know when it happened, too -- when the television in my parents' house broke down and the elderly relative lost the mental stimulation (!) it provided, the mind went into a permanent sunset.

Now let the snarky one say what he will. I check up on the latest research with some frequency. Just Google "beta amyloid" for everything you ever wanted to avoid. If you Google "turmeric beta amyloid" you will understand why I eat curry regularly, as any person with a possibility of Alzheimer's should be doing. I also have lots of mental challenge games and I try to play some of them daily. Simple? Yeah, right.

The terror of suddenly being "lost" while driving on some of the more cookie cutter roads around here -- the losing of words, quotes, phrases -- losing a *entire book* just two days after completing it! I read it. I liked it. Today I looked it up on Amazon and got the information about it back, but it's been scary times, thinking over the possibilities.

The book I forgot had Alzheimer's as a theme. I am hoping that is why I suppressed it so thoroughly. I'm freaked out enough that tomorrow I'm headed to an herb store to get turmeric in capsules so I can take the amount that was used in some recent studies. I guess eating curry isn't enough. I do take my own advice, whether it's simple or complex.


[crossposted @ Mockingbird's Medley]

2 comments:

Pudentilla said...

I hear you. My mom died of frontal lobe dementia (which manifests like alzheimers, but faster) and every time I have to reach for a word or have a memory lapse I shudder and decide it has to be estrogen loss because the alternative is so hard to bear.

I recommend anti-oxidants and eating healthy. I didn't know about the curry. As to the book plots, as someone who reads a lot and loves genre fiction, I'd cut myself some slack. If you read the first pages of the book again, it would come back immediately.

Scorpio said...

Oh, even just reading the first amazon.com review brought it back, because their reviews have character names and keywords. But you can imagine the six hours when I lay there thinking "it will float up", and it did not.