Memory Problems

I'm kinda the same CC... although I do try my best to be stoical, and not get myself stressed because it just makes things worse, but it's difficult when the pain is bad, and I think, well something is causing this pain, and memory loss!! It's not my imagination , and you read so many times about doctors getting it wrong and saying nothings' wrong and then come to find out that people have a serious illness , so it's hard not to get worried

 

Yes, yes, and yes!

Holly, you really should see a doctor ASAP, because the anxiety caused by the problem's origin is not healthy either, and it will make the memory problems worse!

My memory went from sharp and excellent to "where am I?" Literally! A few years ago, I was in the town where we live -- in fact, about four blocks from our house -- and I found myself at an intersection facing a church -- our church -- and suddenly realizing that I had no idea where I was, though I knew I should know where I was. It only lasted a minute or so, but it freaked me out!

I called my doctor's office to say I needed to see him as soon as possible, and his office called that day to tell me to come in the next day. I did. The doctor asked about my diabetes, my weight loss, how I was sleeping. All the problems I'd had recently. I left his office, got home, and realized I hadn't told him a thing about the episode or my concern about the memory problem. I wrote him a note, told him what the problem was and that I'd FORGOTTEN to discuss it with him, even though that was why I wanted the appointment. He called immediately and told me, "I know you think it's Alzheimers, but that's unlikely..." (He was right. I did think that.) Then he referred me to a neurologist.

While I was waiting for the results, Ken and I went to a conference. I sat next to a man, and I don't remember how, but somehow I mentioned -- probably to Ken -- something about the whole thing. The man, it turned out, specialized in Alzheimers, and he said this to me, "When you can't remember what your keys unlock, that's not Alzheimers. If it were Alzheimer's, you wouldn't know it was a key or what a key is for." I don't know if that's so, but it helped the anxiety.

Ok. So, it turned out that my problem was likely a mixture of things. My doctor explained that stress could cause major memory problems. It doesn't have to be like a month of extreme stress; it could be the accumulation of stress over, say, the last year or three years.

I also found out as a result of the neurological testing that I have ADHD, which surprised me, but my entire family acted as if I had said, "I just found out I'm short." They all knew I had attention problems, and though I don't think I ever asked Ken, I imagine he probably knew all along that I didn't pay attention well.

If your liver isn't working right, you eventually end up with what is non-medically called "brain fog," because the liver can't filter toxins -- which is its sole job -- and despite what I think I learned in school, lo these many years ago, the "brain-blood barrier" does doesn't work right when you're in "acute liver failure." I had Hep C -- asymptomatic and then misdiagnosed for three decades -- which is most common in people born between 1945 and 1966. It does not only affect addicts and alcoholics. It can affect veterans and even children from that era because of the way we were vaccinated. You might remember every kid in the school going into the cafeteria or wherever to line up for polio shots, and they would give one kid the vaccination, then the next kid, and then the next, and not change the needle. Or if you're a vet, you may have gotten "jet gun" shots they used for smallpox vaccinations. Well, it turns out that even when nozzles were alcohol-swabbed between injections as the manufacturer recommended. (That last bit was for everyone, not just you, Holly. I spend a lot of time urging people my age to get their blood tested because Hep B and C are both viruses which can cause liver cancer.)

It could be traumatic brain injury (TBI), which you would not always remember happening, because you don't need to have a crowbar smacked into your head to have that kind of injury. It could be something as seemingly untraumatic as slipping on ice and landing on your butt.

According to a neurologist I saw a few times, MS almost always starts to manifest between the ages of 20 and 40. (You probably know that already.) If I had it to do over again, I would save that exam for last, as it's a horrible test! I won't go into too much detail, but it has to do with the doctor giving the patient electrical shocks at various places and measuring the time between the shock and the reaction. When I had to do it, it lasted about 45 minutes. (BTW, that neurologist was going bald in front and had this very long braid at the back of his head which he pulled forward and held there with God-knows-what, but it was so difficult not to laugh at the thought that he didn't realize that we could all tell exactly what he was doing.)

It could be a transient ischemic attack (TIA) which is what happens when the blood flow to the brain is interrupted, by an injury to the blood vessels, narrowing of a blood vessel in or leading to the brain, a blood clot in the brain, or a clot that travels to the brain. You may not even notice this has happened because a TIA can last for literally minutes and almost always less than 24 hours. (It's also an indicator that a stroke might be in the near future of the patient.)

Or it could be any of these: depression, bipolar, Lyme disease, or low levels of vitamins/nutrients the body needs, like B12 or B1. I won't go into the scarier things it could be, because you've probably gone through periods of thinking you have one or the other.

The bottom line is pretty much, "It could be anything!" The fastest and most certain way to find out what it might be is to talk to your doctor and get the necessary testing done. Cognitive testing, EEG, MRI of your head, and blood tests are probably what you'll go through to get the diagnosis and prognosis.

One thing that really helped me was a site called Lumosity, which has a bunch of games (that are really sort of tests) you participate in to sort of exercise your brain. It keeps track of your results so you can see improvements in various areas as you improve. It's got a free version which doesn't give the results as well, but the time of that free version is "forever." You might check that out at lumosity.com.

Also, adopt workarounds, at least until you find out what it is. For example, after a lifetime of being an avid reader, I stopped being able to read anything longer than a paragraph. A SHORT paragraph! By the time I got to the end of the page, I'd forgotten what I had read at the top of the page. But I found out that if I read out loud, it would settle in my brain.

I know this is long and rambling, but I do hope it helped some. And if I forgot to say anything, leaving you with more questions, do feel free to ask.

 

Great post @Michelle Anderson!

 

@Michelle Anderson -thank you so much for this much needed information. @Holly Saunders ,see it could be anything.
A very close family member is going thru thru the same thing.

 

One of the biggest setbacks is that you have to wait so long to see the appropriate doctor @Holly Saunders. Whether the loss of memory functions are something minor and an easy fix or something major, it should be treated as though someone had just broken their neck or back in that it should be treated as an emergency and not as some la-de-da malfunction like a cut on the finger.

I had viral pneumonia compounded with a minor stroke about 40 years ago and it cost me dearly. The short term memory was shot and my long term was so fragmented that it took me years to put things in the right order and to tell the truth, I still do not if all the fragments have been put in place properly.

The short term though, that was a monster to overcome. Not unlike @Michelle Anderson, I could read quite well but didn’t have the foggiest notion of what I had read. Whether a sentence or a paragraph, I would be totally confused because it was like I forgot how to read but still knew the letters and the words but the words and letters didn’t make sense.

Since the doctors I saw didn’t help much, I went into a sort of self training mode. I took an Evelyn Woods course on skim reading which hammers away and exercises short term memory and reconnects or re-routes the processes it takes for short term, intermediate and long term memory. I started doing all sorts of math in my head and mentally visualizing the numbers and geometric figures and I still do the exercises today and almost every day.
In short, I’m happy with the results. Not ecstatic mind you, but happy.

Before this discourse gets too long and boring, memory loss and the problems connected to it can be beaten.
Stressing doesn’t help but doing something about it with one’s chin up and some determination I am sure things will get better.
About a year ago I played with Michelle’s suggestion concerning “Luminosity” (or lumosity?) and I can indeed attest to the value it would have in increasing one’s mental abilities particularly in the memory department.
Yes, definitely see your doctor but even if a person is absolutely healthy in every way, doing some mental exercises as we get older is a must and should be done daily.

As always, my prayers are with you Holly.........

 

@Holly Saunders, I don't have any advice to add to the excellent advice others have posted. I just want to say I'm sending you positive thoughts along with a ton of hugs.

 

Can I just say thank you to you @Michelle Anderson , & @Bobby Cole for your very informative posts , as well as ken and everyone else who has made suggestions along the way.

I won't continue to bore you all with the rest of what's going on, but suffice to say that I have suffered several of the instances you outlined in your post Michelle .. eg..the forgetting for a minute, where I was, while being outdoors in a place very well known to me etc...

I'm so relieved and thankful to find that you've been though this and are ok now... and ken yes, I understand about going from one room to another and forgetting what you were about o say..that's how it started with me over a year ago, and has got steadily worse...

I know all about lumosity it's brain training I've used for several years since I first discovered it...

.. as you say Bobby it's a long time to see the primary doctor, but even longer before he will send me if he feels it necessary, for any kind of tests.. could be up to 6 months.....

I thank you all for being of help to me so far... I can only hope that it's nothing more sinister than something easily managed, but please if at any time you see me repeating myself over something ..you'll know why.

ETA... sorry I forgot ''classic example'' to thank @Yvonne Smith for your helpful answer too..many thanks mi chica..

 

Here lately my LONG TERM MEMORY WHILE DREAMING IS SO STRANGE. I am remembering things that I would prefer to forget.

 

I don’t know about “ok,” but definitely better and much more functional.

I still have to read out loud, though that might be that I’m not trying to read otherwise for fear of failure.

And I have this depth perception problem which is the weirdest thing ever. It happens only in certain circumstances. For example, for years, Ken and I have played a card game after pretty much every meal. It has been a very long time since either of us asked the other, “Do you want to play tonight?” We just clear the dining table and play UNO, or Skipbo, or Phase 10. And I will see a place where I should place a card but will put it on the wrong pile. I try hard not to make that mistake, but my brain loses touch with what my hands are doing. (That’s the only way I can even remotely describe it,)

I can feel the PROCESS of thinking changing, Like my thoughts are traveling differently than they used to. When I mentioned that to my doctor, she told me that it made sense because my brain seemed to be making new connections because the old ones are faulty.

That results in my thinking more slowly, which is frustrating, but I am thinking. When I was young, I was on several game shows, including Jeopardy, Joker’s Wild, and Split Second (where the winner of the questions portion of the show got a key and could pick from 5 cars on the showroom floor. If the car started, the contestant won it. If now, the contestant played the next day, and there were only 4 cars, etc). All of them took fast reactions to hit the buzzer first and fast thinking to get the answer right. Now, when I watch Jeopardy or any other game show, I can get the answers, but never, ever in time.

@Bobby Cole, I thought the same thing when I first heard of Lumosity. When I started going there, the domain “luminosity.com” was taken by a lamp/lighting company, which I ended up on more than once. At some point that was no longer the case and now luminosity.com redirects to lumosity.com, likely because of the huge amounts the company has spent on advertising, logos, etc.

It’s almost laughable how great my long-term memory is when I can’t remember a news item long enough to walk back to Ken’s office and relate the story to him! Yet, I can name every person who was in every one of my classes in grade school, and in many cases where they sat in class!

My simplified understanding from discussions with my doctor are that short- and long-term memory are each stored in totally different parts of the brain. Short term memory is stored in the prefrontal lobe. Long-term memory is stored in the neocortex. And those memories are transferred from the prefrontal lobe to the neocortex, which is the largest portion of the cerebral cortex, via hippocampus, which is below the cerebral cortex.

I don’t get why the short-term seems so much more delicate or maybe more susceptible to decay than long-term. But I do know it happens that way much of the tine.

 

You are not boring us.. this is info we all need to know..Got you message- your welcome

 

In my research to define "thought" I had to do some study regarding memory and how it pertains to my own work and I found some pretty interesting stuff or at least, to me it is.

Short term memory is kind of quirky in that it's done in batches and groups or as a singular event or say, a letter or a number. Phone numbers and social security numbers are a good example of groupings. Even though they are grouped in segments for different reasons than for a way to remember them, the division between the sets of numbers does make it easier to process and hold them in long term memory.
Interestingly, the normal person can only process 5 groups, plus or minus 2 at a time before in mere seconds it either connects to a larger group or dissipates and is lost entirely. The ease of how something in short term memory is processed is totally dependent upon it's ability to connect to something else in long term.

A good example might be:
If the first time we ever experienced what a chocolate cake was a three tier round object with chocolate frosting and sprinkles, our long term memory of what a cake is will forever be haunted by the thing with chocolate frosting and sprinkles. Though everything about that cake is simply descriptive, a cake is never truly a cake without the initial presentation of it.
Still, after a bit, we learn that not all cakes have the chocolate and sprinkles so then the sight and memory of what other cakes are "link or connect" to that first exposure of a cake.
It's like a filing cabinet drawer called "cakes" but there's a picture on the front with that first cake and all other cakes are filed behind the first. They're connected even though they are not the same.

But, here's the rub. What if there is nothing to connect to? What if the picture along with the contents of the drawer and as a matter of fact, the whole drawer disappears? What then and who the heck took the drawer?

As to who took the drawer, it could be a lot of culprits. In the case of the frontal lobe, a bruise, prion proteins, too much ammonia from protein synthesis, a tumor, oxygen deprivation and a host of other maladies or simple reasons for the occurrence.
For one, if our intake of proteins are greater than what our bodies can process properly then ammonia crosses the blood brain barrier and a bunch of brain cells can get wiped out. After all, the normal human only needs about 36 grams of protein a day but our society has raised that bar way beyond what our bodies can truly handle safely.
Another reason might be oxygen deprivation which can be caused by excess alcohol consumption or anything else that might cause a constriction of the blood vessels.
Or, a diet that doesn't consist of brain healthy foods literally starve the brain into a slow death.

Now, what to do? Find a good Neurologist. check. Start doing mental exercises which rebuild base connections. check. Examine the diet and manage it according to what the brain needs. check.
Perhaps "diet" might be best served by placing it in the number one slot because after all, our brain is who we are and we are what we eat.

 

Holly,your posts are clear. I have a suspicion that anxiety is a major factor in your memory loss. If you look up dementia, leading authorities tell you that by doing so means you do not have the affliction. I can support this, two of my friends have dementia. It took a year before it was noticeable and not once did they admit or worry about having dementia. To them forgetfulness was the fault of somebody else, usually mine.
The truth is we all forget, which is frustrating because things come back hours or days later. Another frustration is you can remember things from your childhood but not what you had for breakfast.
I agree that a visit to the doctor is a good idea and I would bet you are just like the rest of us.

 

We need an update on this @Holly Saunders. How are you doing now? Unfortunately, the long waits for medical appointments are a consequence of the NHS. Canadians have the same problem and often come across the border if they can afford it to address serious problems in a more prompt manner. There can be delays here, too, but they are no the usual situation here. We all still wish you well.

 

I have memory problems, but what I can't remember isn't important...just annoying, like the name of some secondary political or entertainment figure in recent news.

What I DO remember is the formula for determining the resonant frequency of a tuned circuit when capacitance and inductance are known, and the ability to find a celestial body by using Right Ascension and Declination with my astronomical telescopes, as well as the necessary components for theoretically bringing about a Thermonuclear reaction, plus the ability to set up my metal-turning Lathe for a precision machining operation, liked the components for the large million-volt Van de Graaff generator that I designed and built a few years ago.

The minor memory annoyances I do have can be attributed to an onset of recalcitrant plebney, complicated by normal aging.

No Dementia...that's for sure!

Hal