Brain Fog..or...Funny weather we're having, isn't it?

As FLYlady would say, the Midnight Editor is working overtime tonight. I seem to have some  many things I want to put on paper - or virtual paper, anyway. I kept hearing this title over and over again about Brain Fog and knew I needed to write something.

It may have been because I read an article today explaining some of the research done on "brain fog" of Lupus patients - something I've been very interested in from the time it started to affect me. My alternate title for this entry was "From Honor Student to ....what was I saying again??". Yep, that's sort of my story.

Part of me wants to talk about how I wasn't always like this. I was the precocious, intelligent Honor Student who got As on everything and loved being at the front of the class. I love the start of each new school year, the new class list and the smell of the next textbooks. I was a nerd and I loved to learn. I read the encyclopedia (when they were still printed on paper) and dictionary, in a pinch. I felt like an empty cup and I just poured knowledge into my brain as fast as I could. Maybe I knew there would be a time I would feel my brain is "full"...like now.

I remember when I started having trouble - I couldn't keep up with the responsibilities of my job as a program manager in the IT department at work. I had worked hard to earn the promotion from programmer and once I was there, I realized it was too much for me. I stepped back down to my programming job, but it still didn't feel comfortable. Luckily for me, I got married soon thereafter and left to have a baby almost immediately and I could have sworn I heard my bosses breath a sigh of relief that I was off their hands. I sighed with relief, too, because I don't know how much more I could have handled.

I didn't get my diagnosis until five years later, but by that time I had been home tending to my two baby boys and quick intelligence didn't mean as much as quick reflexes - which I still had. :) I remember having a hard time pronouncing words but I thought it was just because I was home all day alone and wasn't talking to anyone very much - in English, that is. After my diagnosis, things started to make sense. At least as much as they could to my foggy brain. I had started to fear driving because I felt like I was still asleep half the time - I was, because my brain was still asleep. I sideswiped a parked car one day - and was surprised it hadn't happened earlier. I was thoroughly shaken, but also hoped that people in my life would realize what was happening. I started being careful of when I drove and how. I noticed I was forgetting names and places and even what I was talking about in the  middle of a sentence. Or I knew what I wanted to say..but couldn't think of the word. I remembered my grandmother had that problem, but thought she was alot older than I am. But was she?

So here I am, in the middle of the night, writing this because...why? Why have I always written? I think when I was a child, it was hoping that I'd look back and understand myself and remember what had happened - and how brilliantly I had written it....but when I write now, it is for a different reason. So I can look back and remember what had happened - and how brilliantly I was still writing it. :) And maybe, just maybe, because if I write what my foggy brain is thinking and someone reads it one day, then I won't disappear into a foggy brain illness that will claim me one day. I will still be here, on these pages, even when I can't write them anymore. And that's probably the reason I've always written. So that someone will know I am here. One day.