My last blog post covered some of the very serious digestive system issues that I deal with and how they not only affect my physical health, but also my cognitive and executive function as well. These issues developed over time, and they weren't always this serious. They began as lapses that I started having a decade ago, small things such as withdrawing money from an ATM machine, and then standing there wondering when it would return my debit card. After assuming that my card was swallowed, I resorted to calling the bank to cancel my card and was left wondering how their machinery could malfunction in such a way. It came to my surprise that it wasn't the ATM machine that had malfunctioned, but it was my ability to form new short-term memories. The card was already in my wallet and had been there the entire time.

The reaction I had at that very moment was extremely similar to that of drinking to the point of being black out drunk, it's not the case of being knocked out and forgetting what happened, it's the brain no longer 'recording' what's going on.

While these incidents were seemingly isolated at first, they began to increase in frequency and variety. I made the cardinal sin of believing this to be related to work, or worse yet, believing that it was related to age so I put it off. It couldn't possibly get worse, right?

Just over five years ago, I was walking down a street that I lived on for almost a decade. I know the street intimately, where absolutely anything and everything is. I knew the various stalls, the different vendors, the numerous office workers going up and down the sidewalk, the shoe cobbler sitting alongside the road, the scabby stray dogs and cats, etc. What was meant to be a typical routine stroll ended up becoming a walk down amnesia lane. I was no longer in a place I recognized, but something was still telling me that I should be capable of recognizing it.

Having had a grandmother who had Alzheimer's, I knew well enough to quickly duck into the nearest restaurant, order something to eat, and ask for a pen and paper. I made an extremely pathetic attempt to draw a clock which proved to be wholly unsuccessful.

Why are people that have reduced cognitive ability asked to draw a clock? It's due to the amount of detail and intricacies that are involved on a clock's face. If you were asked to draw a clock that showed the time being half past one then you'd need to first draw the face, place the numerals for the hours, line out the minutes, and correctly draw where the short and long hand point. When cognitive function becomes impacted, something that would seem like a simple task becomes needlessly complicated.

That was when I knew something was seriously wrong, and it was the start of what would become an endless amount of hospital visits where misdiagnoses and incorrect medication made the problem far worse (not to mention my own stubbornness in sticking to the right lifestyle changes, but that's another blog post entirely).

So that was essentially my biggest scare, and the most indicative event that told me something was seriously wrong. I'd taken for granted being healthy all my life, and my hubris and obstinance guaranteed that those issues weren't going away anytime soon. There were other events after this that shot up my health anxiety, such as having a dinner meeting and having no idea where I was and who was around me, seeing shapes, lights, movement, that were never there (I got so used to it at some point that it stopped bothering me), and so on.

Also if you must know, I drew the 1 where the 12 should've been for the clock test that day.