“Slowing Thinking”

When I saw Susie the other day, I asked for a few clippings from her garden out front. I brought them home and made gelli prints. That big green leaf is not what you think it is.

My wonderful doctor recently put me on a new medicine (Gabapentin) to alleviate some of the nasty effects of my nerve damage, and to help with another issue. I began taking it ten days ago and it wasn’t long before I started getting spacier than usual. To wit: as I told you in my last post, I tried to make stovetop coffee without putting water in the— Damn it: that’s another problem. I’m continually unable to retrieve familiar words. In order to finish that last sentence, I had to wait 18 hours until “reservoir” suddenly flashed into my mind. I also found in my pocketbook a plastic baggie (don’t tell Susie) with a big chunk of cheddar cheese that had been there for five days. I’ve always been terrified of dementia so am unhappy about my brain’s malfunctioning synapses.

I’m fine with the significant things: vigilant driving, taking care of daily needs, exercising sound judgment, and so on. Where I fall short is with the little everyday stuff that one does automatically. I have not been not sufficiently mindful, is the trouble.

I wasn’t scheduled for a check-in with my doc for another couple weeks but after wet coffee grounds exploded across the stove and counter due to an, uh, unmindful decision, I determined it was time to contact her.

In the email I described a handful of my recent mental missteps. Turns out she was out of the office today, but her stand-in felt the matter important enough to send me a reply right away. I learned that this isn’t entirely the fault of naturally deteriorating grey matter.

I am sorry to hear you have been experiencing side effects. Gabapentin can be responsible for slowing thinking which sounds like it might have been the case for you.

I suppose on one hand it’s good when medical professionals don’t forewarn you about the nonlethal potentials of a drug, lest one develop psychosomatic manifestations of them. But I wouldn’t have minded having a clue or two in advance. (My only tip-off was when my buddy Nick told me the medicine made him “stupid.” I didn’t figure that’d happen to me, though; at the time, my acuity felt unusually sharp.) The on-call doctor outlined a plan for me gradually to taper off, with the option to wait until I talk directly to my own provider first. Nope. I started reducing the dosage immediately. Within a couple days I’ll be well on my way to my old brilliant, scintillating, incisive self. 

But man oh man, are my daily prescriptions and doctor-mandated vitamins getting complicated: morning, midday and evening doses differ from one another, and there’s the Gabapentin fade-out (three at night, three on awakening, two at noon…). I have pill holders with labels that help a lot, but I get thoroughly confused when loading them up for the week. Here’s the scene as I tried to parcel out and package up everything neatly for the next handful of days. Notice (lower-right) that I had to write it all down first.

And here’s what it looed like once I worked my magic, which took a full half-hour.

Side-effects aside, my brain deficiencies are not entirely new. Let me tell you about when I was my mid-thirties.

A preface: the reason I decided to move out of my East Oakland house in the early 1990s was because within a span of two weeks (when my kids were eleven and one), three people were murdered on my block. I love Oakland, but that seemed just a bit much. Even with an alarm system, I didn’t feel safe from the crack addict women who showed up at my front door and in my backyard at 5:00 a.m., and the homicidal men who chased them there.

After the killings, I was reading aloud a news article about them. Since young Eleni was lurking in a room nearby, I made sure that when I reached a scary scenario, I spelled out the letters of the offending words so as not to alarm her. But despite my best intentions, my narrative came out something like this:

The man was F-O-U-N-D bound and gagged in his H-O-U-S-E. He had been shot in the B-A-C-K of the head…

Like mother, like daughter. Eleni, too, has been getting it backwards about which parts to voice and which to elide when she reads Little House in the Big Woods to her kids, an otherwise lovely book that bursts at the seams with deeply offensive and belittling opinions about Native and African Americans.

Eleni and I have other issues with addled logic. Here she is helping Jesse, age six, with his reading assignment:

“Now, what letter makes the ‘S’ sound?”

I’ll be leaving once again for Chico shortly. Eleni is quite (and rightfully) concerned about the safety of her as-yet unvaccinated little ones, so I want to be sure she feels safe with me around. As always, I’ve been perhaps excessively Covid-careful so the likelihood of my bringing to disease to them is infinitesimal. However, I’ve had this catch in my throat for the past several months that makes me go ahem, ahem all the time, so I wondered if she might worry I’m sick. To put her mind at ease about this particular condition, I went for a Covid test at Kaiser Permanente. I didn’t tell her about it; I wanted it to be a reassuring surprise.

The next day I received this message: 

Test Not Done; Wrong Specimen Type Received.

I don’t know what happened but it’s annoying: a pain to have to return for another long wait and more snout-scrubbing, and the delay means the result might not come back in time. I debated what to do. The nearest rapid-testing site was in SF. A friend told me about the BinaxNOW Antigen Self-Test Kit—not as reliable as PCR, but pretty good—but it’s out of stock in most places. (Walgreens online had them and ordered six for another time.) In the end, I managed to claw my way through the inscrutable KP website (it’s designed specifically to arouse frustration and fury) to schedule another test. An hour later, my friend Cheryl recommended testthepeople.org, a free PCR place in North Oakland that has a quick turnaround. I opted for that instead, but then Kaiser’s website wouldn’t let me cancel. In the late afternoon, off I went to Test the People, which I , too, highly recommend: no line, nice people, fast results, free. My Kaiser appointment was half an hour after I finished there. I do so hate letting people down when I’ve made a commitment, so I spontaneously aimed toward KP for yet another drive-through test. Now I have the most sparkling nostrils in town. My hope is that at least one of them doesn’t get corrupted.

Postcript: I got a 3:07 text this morning from Test the People. Logging in, I found this message:

Negative, No Detection of Covid-19 Virus.

As expected, but still good to know. And wow: PCR results in under twelve hours! Amazing. Thank you for the lead, Cheryl. Eleni: does this make you happy?