Do you suffer from memory loss? I don't remember....

 Do you know that song by Chumbawamba? It was a hit when I was growing up. The phrase in the song goes, "Do you suffer from long-term memory loss? I don't remember."

I don't remember the day I hit my head. I think I blocked it out. I can remember flashes of it but that's all. Most people remember clearly the traumatic event that changed their life, unless it affected their memory. The injury didn't just take my vocabulary away. It took away my recent memories. I forgot movies I had seen, books I had read. I forgot how to do my job, a job I had been doing for 5 years.

The memory loss shows itself in a variety of ways. I have had to learn to adapt and cope with it. Most people don't even notice. I understand better now how dementia can go undetected for so long.

So here's a glimpse into my world.

Today, a new client came into the office. She was looking for information about how to make an appointment for her husband's first visit with a nurse. She said she had been calling and calling and couldn't get a hold of anyone. I asked her what number she called. She told me and I figured out she was a client of one of our clinics. So I called my manager to ask about getting one of the coordinators to call her. The manager said to take her over to the clinic to talk to the nurse. So I did. When we got there, it transpired that her husband hadn't even had the first visit at the hospital and so there was no medical order from the hospital which we needed in order to call her to make the appointment for the visit. I knew of all of this, somewhere in the darkest corners of my mind. So I explained to her that once her husband went to the hospital for treatment, they would send an order to our office and our coordinator would call her. But I needed the prompt from the clinic nurse to get that information back. And that was not the first time, by far, that I have had to depend on someone else at work to remember something I already knew.

Here are some examples of what my memory is like now:

When I need to remember something for longer than one second, and I mean literally one second, I either have to keep repeating it, or I have to write it down. I can't trust myself to remember detailed information. If the information gets more complex, I can't even try the repeating method. My brain simply cannot hold onto multiple pieces of information. I depend on lists.

When I am following directions, I read them multiple times before I even begin, just to try to understand what they say. Then once I start, I go back and read each step multiple times again as I do them. The longer each step is, the more times I read them. I even have to break steps up if there are two or more activities in the step. If someone is giving me directions, I need them one at a time and with time to prepare.

If I am asked for a summary of something I have read or watched, I can give a very broad overview. And I mean broad. I may be able to pick out some details that stuck out to me but they will be random and sparse. I remember that I really like certain books and movies from before my injury and remember the storylines somewhat faintly, but I will not be able to explain even those to you. Except maybe the few I saw or read several times.

I hate being asked what I did yesterday, or last weekend, or what I had for a certain meal. I spend so much of my energy just trying to function that remembering what I'm doing is not a priority for me.

PCS steals the ability to just go through life. We can't simply catalogue everything away for later as we go. We don't hold information in our heads anymore. The connections don't work like they used to.

Do I have memory loss? Let me check my list...