This page is referenced by the blog, as well as other pages. The entries here are not in any particular order, and will be added to as the site grows
Asthma
I was a severe asthmatic as a kid. The medical profession didn’t have much to help severe asthmatics in the 1950s. My growth was stunted, and I was pretty scrawny. My parents were told by two very different doctors that it wasn’t likely that I would live much past the age of 12. In third grade, I was home sick (or in the hospital) more days than I attended school. That poor attendance was supposed to prevent me from advancing to 4th grade. The school board was notified by my parents, and doctor, about my limited life expectancy. With that in mind, they put me in 4th grade. Nobody cared that I was lacking the fine motor control to write in cursive. I could form the letters, alright, but only very slowly… not effective enough to write a legible sentence in a reasonable amount of time. That difficulty has not improved with age, and is still a source of embarrassment today. I am very grateful for keyboards.
Wrong Planet
No one was bothered much about my inability to socialize; it was thought I just didn’t spend enough time in school, to try and blend in with the other kids. I did have one friend in 2nd & 3rd grade; his name was Roy, and I think he was as sickly as I was. I remember that he had dark hair on his scrawny arms (anemic?).Together, we tried to figure out the world. It somewhere about this time that I realized that there was a piece of my brain missing. With my vast knowledge of human biology (gleaned from the pages of The World Book Encyclopedia), that was the only explanation I could come up with (today, that phenomenon is known as “Wrong Planet Syndrome”). Everybody seemed to know some things that I didn’t. The kids all hung around together, running around playing, yakking about who-knows-what. Each one seemed to understand what the others were doing and saying… I definitely didn’t belong with them.
Unpacking
Unpacking refers to what happens to old farts, like me, when they finally realize they are autistic. It can take a few months or, as in my case, more than a year. It seems that it has to do with how old you are, and how eventful your life has been. Once the old fart has finished working out that they are really & truly autistic, a sort of review of everything that happened in your life: all the memories you have (and many you have forgotten), all the embarrassing moments, every decision, every conversation, every event, everything you wish you didn’t remember, all of, gets involuntarily revisited through an “Autistic Lens”. It is all consuming, at first. And when it’s almost over, it all doesn’t go out like a light, it just slows down and the memories come as more of an interruption. Depending on how many times you think you humiliated yourself, unpacking can be a very undesirable process.
Amnesia
At the end of October, 2010, I had an “event”. I woke one morning and starting crying for no discernible reason. After the crying subsided, I went to the living room and sat down at my desk. As I logged into the bank I was consulting at, and started to think about what I was going to try and accomplish that day, I instantly realized that I had no idea, whatsoever, how to do my job!!! I didn’t have the slightest idea how to do the analysis and projections that were core to my function as a IT Performance Analysis & Capacity Planning at the bank. The crying started again.
From this point forward, much of what I disclose is what I’ve been told, along with a few memories of the event and what followed
Jamie immediately called my shrink that had been treating me since 1995 for Panic Disorder & the anxiety and depression that invariably accompany PD. He called the pharmacy and ordered some sublingual benzo to help slow me down. Jay & I saw him that afternoon. After some discussion, he determined that I had Accute Stress Disorder, and that it had created retrograde & anterograde. The was no diagnosis for the amnesia at that time, but in the next revision of the DSM, it was identified as Psychogenic Amnesia. I had forgotten who I was. Not in the traditional sense, where someone forgets their name, but rather I didn’t know who Fred was. I didn’t know what made Fred… Fred! My memory recall was pretty useless, and I had difficulty forming new memories. I also had a very difficult time remaining upright, I had to walk with a cane. Over the next several months, I had MRI’s fMRI’s, CT scans, and memory tests. After about 5 months, some of my retrograde memories came back, and the shrink said that where I was, was probably going to be as good as it was going to get. He was right.
Today, I still have a crappy memory; CRS. I also have come to realize that the few memories of my past that I have, have no “presence”; I can see what was happening at the time, but I’m not present in the memories. It’s something like I can see a picture of an event, and even remember what happened, but I was never there! My memories are more like seeing a picture in a news article, and I have read what went on, but I was never there. If the memory was of an event attended, the memory is more like reading about it in a newspaper… I wasn’t present t the event. That is how I remember things now.
Last year, I was washing dishes & listening to music, when a fresh memory popped up. It was a concert Jay and I attended, and I was THERE! I stopped what I was doing, and tears rolled out. I yelled out to Jamie what just happened. WE were AT the concert! A real memory. It didn’t last, but I remember the feeling. It hasn’t happened since, but I keep that feeling close.
The last memory tests I had were in 2015. It showed that I had superior executive functions, but I had bilateral Hippocampus atrophy; I have no hope of ever finding out “who Fred was, or is”.