My big diagnosis

I have been diagnosed with Temporal Lobe Epilepsy.

The last two weeks have been a whirlwind of tests, hospitals, and even a neurosurgeon after a nocturnal seizure at the end of May robbed me of a swath of memories and left me with a chunk missing out of my tongue.

I am currently taking my time relearning lost information, re-introducing myself to people I’ve forgotten, taking medication to (hopefully) forestall further seizures, and coming to grips with living with this diagnosis. My thought processes are slower - both following and participating in conversations - with words sometimes hard to grasp and understand.

Needless to say, I didn’t see this coming. I’ve been dealing with menopausal symptoms this year and taking hormone replacements to help ease hot flushes and mood disorders, and it seems, conflating some epilepsy symptoms with menopausal ones. The deja vu I’ve associated with menopause turns out to be a classic example of seizures or auras indicating epilepsy where I just thought they were my special flavour of hot flashes.

I’m not sure if you’ve ever had deja vu, but to me it has a very distinct set of sensations to make me feel very strongly that I have lived this moment before. Since my seizure at the end of May, I have not had another deja vu, but I have had the feeling that I’ve meet new acquaintances before - as if they are extremely familiar - but this is the first time we've met: my neurosurgeon (I have one of those now), doctors in the emergency ward, nurses taking blood samples - I felt as if I had known them in the past. It took me a little while to work out this was “all in my head” but it was quite unsettling at the time and now I’m pleased to say it’s gone away as I relearn my life.

I have forgotten all sorts of things I don’t even know I’ve forgotten: my sister visiting for the weekend in May; The Proclaimers concert with my cousin Kristy in April; my niece’s graduation; a number of other seizures in the last few months. My ex-husband Greg has become my memory-keeper, and has been coming to Doctor’s appointments with me so he can repeat this new version of my medical history I can’t recall so they know what’s going on.

I’m writing this here so you know what’s going on, but not so you’ll worry.

Please don't worry.

My family are an amazing support system. I’m extremely fortunate to have wonderful, generous, capable people around me. Work has been incredibly supportive and generous. I’m also extremely fortunate that I’ve not had a stroke, or dementia, or alzheimers or other brain damaging diseases which would be way, way worse.

What I have is a relatively typical, age-appropriate (turns out) disorder that can be treated and managed successfully with proven pharmaceuticals. I seem to be responding well and getting better and more "me" every day.

I’m also writing this here in case I have another seizure and need to remember this memory. Yay for personal blogs, right? 

Muscles remembering what my memory forgets

Last Friday night I dragged my DLSr and tripod out under the stars to take photographs of the lunar eclipse.

Out there, in the dark, I realised I'd forgotten how to take a long exposure photograph. I tried different menus and thought different memories until I eventually dragged the information from the depths of my brain and took a bunch of blurry photos of the moon. 

Afterwards, as I was falling asleep thinking about how it's getting harder and harder for me to remember things I realised that no matter what age I am, or how much I’ve done it lately, I always know how to touch type.

“Muscle memory has been used synonymously with motor learning, which is a form of procedural memory that involves consolidating a specific motor task into memory through repetition. When a movement is repeated over time, a long-term muscle memory is created for that task, eventually allowing it to be performed without conscious effort. ”

— http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscle_memory

I began to learn to type at school in third form - that's aged 13 years old here in New Zealand. We had big, old, manual typewriters that weighed a ton and took great effort to push the keys down hard enough to type a letter. Each typewriter also had a fabric bib tied around it covering the keys. Right from day one we never were allowed to look at the keys. We’d come to class, take our seats, slip our hands underneath the bib and find the home keys with our fingertips.

Our teacher, a nun with the Sisters of Mercy - a misnomer if ever there was one - drilled our fingers into submission and toned our muscle memory for the typewriter keyboard. Over the next two years I learned to touch type and by the time I left that school and moved to Taranaki to a new high school with bibles typewriters, I was the only person in the new class who could touch type.

After leaving school in 1980 to start my first job as a clerk in a draughting office, I didn't need to type in my life again until the mid-nineties when I discovered the Netscape browser icon on my husband's MacIntosh laptop.

So let's pause for a moment to recap:

• 3 years of typing tuition resulting in the skill to touch type
• 16 years of not typing
• 1996 sat down at a keyboard and could touch type.

Now that's some amazing teaching and learning right there. That typing stuff stuck!

The Sister of Mercy who wouldn't let me use a typing eraser; who wouldn't let me look at my keys; who drilled and intimidated and scolded and insisted that we concentrated, taught my muscles and my memory to do something so well, that I could recall it 16 years after my last lesson to use it again with very little problem.

Back in those days girls like me took typing. I was the kind of girl who believed she didn't have an aptitude for language or mathematics, who had little hope of being smart enough for university, who would, if lucky, get a job in a typing pool and hoped she'd "marry well”. 

I didn't end up using my primary skill of touch typing when I applied for jobs after high school. I did end up using my self-taught skill of tracing and became a draughtsman instead.

Lunar eclipse on Friday 4 April 2015

So how did my brain remember how to type without looking at the keys when I can’t even remember how to leave the shutter open on my own camera when I need to? I suspect it was those drills. Hours upon hours of typing drills. I can still remember what some of them were:

• okay I don't remember them after all
  
• but my muscles in my brain and fingers
  
• still know where the letters are on the keyboard.

Today I am grateful to that Sister of [Little] Mercy who drilled my muscles until they would never forget how to tap on a keyboard without looking at my fingers. It turned out to be the Number One most useful skill to learn in the 1970s for the future that turns out to depend so heavily on the QWERTY keyboard input device.

Associated links:

• Sisters of Mercy (website)
• Typing Club (learn to touch type)
• How to photograph a lunar eclipse (Nikon)
• How to improve your memory (Open Polytechnic)