It seems as if time goes by quicker
each day. I only have my Christmas decorations as far as the landing, waiting
to go into their storage boxes. My snowmen are still sitting on the ledge
although, gee, it hasn’t snowed in a week. Our first almost-spring rain melted
the last of the snow in the yard as long ago as yesterday. Where has the time
gone? St. Patty’s day is less than a week away and Easter is on the horizon.
I believe that it is the busyness of
life that hides more hours than the one we lost between Saturday and Sunday.
Juggling several projects at one time means I’m constantly putting out fires.
Sometimes, I make progress and feel like I’m attacking the fires with a
high-pressure fire department hose. More often than not, I look at the growing
to-do list and might as well be beating back the flames with a gunnysack, and
one that isn’t even wet.
Where has the time gone? I look at
the year 2019 and realize how vividly I can remember events of fifty years ago.
This is the year of a golden anniversary that will never happen. Jim’s life was
cut short by an Alzheimer’s type of dementia—a disease I had never heard
of—corticobasal ganglionic degeneration.
CBGD is a rare disease that attacks
the cerebral cortex and the basal ganglia in the brain. The onset usually
occurs between the ages of 45 and 70 with an average duration of six or seven years.
After he looked at Jim’s autopsy report, his neurologist explained that CBGD is
a movement disorder. Initial symptoms are usually difficulty walking because of
stiffness, shakiness, or balance problems. This is usually followed with
problems with speech and comprehension.
For some reason, Jim’s earliest
noticeable symptoms were with memory and speech. Early in the disease, he
developed aphasia from the damage to his brain. He had trouble speaking and
understanding words. Jim also had alien limb syndrome, especially in his right
hand. He had to have his little finger amputated due to infection caused from
clinching the hand he forgot how to use. He also had ideomotor apraxia (IMA)
that resulted in his feet appearing to stick to the floor causing him to lose
his balance.
I was relieved to learn that CBGD is
almost always sporadic and not inherited. A variant in the tau gene is
associated with a predisposition to CBGD, meaning it can occur more often in
some families. However, not all people with CBGD have the tau gene variant, and
not all people with the variant develop CBGD.
Jim passed away in 2005 after ten
years of living with CBGD. Next month marks the fourteenth year anniversary of
his death. Where did the years go? Sometimes, it seems a different lifetime, a
different me. Other times, it takes my breath away as the realization that he
is forever gone batters my heart anew. The pain is physical in those moments
and I can almost feel life slipping away.
How did seconds turn into minutes,
and minutes into hours? How did twenty-four of those hours turn into days? How
did the days turn into years? How many years will you and I have in a lifetime?
The questions remain the same, but the answers are the biggest mystery of all.
Copyright © March 2019 by L.S.
Fisher
#ENDALZ
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