When my oldest daughter Dakotah was almost a year old I started having feelings of weakness and shortness of breath. One day when heading to work I started having severe chest pains and thought I better go see a doctor, so I headed in to urgent care. After many hours of poking and podding and wires running to my chest, and being asked numerous times if I was taking cocaine, I was diagnosed with Congestive Heart Failure. I was sent immediately to a wonderful cardiologist, who put me on a regimen of heart and blood pressure medication, which seems to be keeping my heart going. The first several years my heart function increased, and then it leveled off. This last check up it had again increased, so the medication must be doing its job.
I guess it is a sign of aging to be on heart medication, I knew it sure made me feel old. And after a couple of years on the medicine I noticed other signs of aging. I was starting to forget things. You know that feeling when you walk into a room and can't remember what you had walked in there for? Well that was happening to me ALL THE TIME. Or I would be at work, putting parts away, I would skip a location because I couldn't find the part in the case I was putting away. When I got to the end of the aisles I'd have the part left, and couldn't remember why I had a part. Then I'd look at the computer and couldn't figure out why it was sending me back. Or at home I would be talking and suddenly couldn't remember the name of that big white box where we put food to keep it cold. Words were disappearing from my mind. I though I had early onset Alzheimer's. I thought I was going crazy.
Then I got online and looked at side effects for my medicines. Buried on a small little website, not listed on most of the websites, under my Coreg was "Short term memory loss". I also looked up ways to fight memory loss. It suggested playing mental games throughout the day. It also said that keeping a journal or writing were good things to keep the mind active and alive. So if people at work see me mouthing things to myself in the aisle, or doodling on a break, or generally looking distracted, I'm probably just playing a mind game, so I don't lose my mind. And my blog here, although new, and the novel I'm writing, and most of my other writings, are just ways to keep my mind going to battle off side effects of a drug I need to keep my heart going strong. So as long as there is a heart beating in this chest of mine, words will be flowing out on my computer, so I'll remember that food goes in a refrigerator.
I guess it is a sign of aging to be on heart medication, I knew it sure made me feel old. And after a couple of years on the medicine I noticed other signs of aging. I was starting to forget things. You know that feeling when you walk into a room and can't remember what you had walked in there for? Well that was happening to me ALL THE TIME. Or I would be at work, putting parts away, I would skip a location because I couldn't find the part in the case I was putting away. When I got to the end of the aisles I'd have the part left, and couldn't remember why I had a part. Then I'd look at the computer and couldn't figure out why it was sending me back. Or at home I would be talking and suddenly couldn't remember the name of that big white box where we put food to keep it cold. Words were disappearing from my mind. I though I had early onset Alzheimer's. I thought I was going crazy.
Then I got online and looked at side effects for my medicines. Buried on a small little website, not listed on most of the websites, under my Coreg was "Short term memory loss". I also looked up ways to fight memory loss. It suggested playing mental games throughout the day. It also said that keeping a journal or writing were good things to keep the mind active and alive. So if people at work see me mouthing things to myself in the aisle, or doodling on a break, or generally looking distracted, I'm probably just playing a mind game, so I don't lose my mind. And my blog here, although new, and the novel I'm writing, and most of my other writings, are just ways to keep my mind going to battle off side effects of a drug I need to keep my heart going strong. So as long as there is a heart beating in this chest of mine, words will be flowing out on my computer, so I'll remember that food goes in a refrigerator.
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