Abstract

Abstract

Saturday, June 23, 2018

Anxiety


My plan this week was to write about the corrosive effect of anxiety among people with dementia. That is still my aim, but not quite the way I expected. As a prologue, I must confess that I lost most of my first draft of this blogpost. I thought I was immune to this kind of mistake. I always back up my drafts, off-site. Where the vulnerability was exposed was in the name of the file. The two files were almost identical: only one or two key strokes were different. I was left with a rump end. From time to time, I aim to hit a lyrical vein, or even a stream-of-consciousness flow—if the piece had survived. My writing was flowing. I felt this would be one of my better blogposts. But the next day I had almost no recollection of what I had written the day before. That speaks volumes about this insidious disease.
The file should have been in the trash-can icon, from which I could easily have retrieved it to my desktop. I was pleased with my first draft. And when I realized I was having trouble finding it, I didn’t panic. I assumed that there was a way to bring forth my missing file. But the other file, the shorter one, was overwritten. One file held the entire draft. The other one held a fragment, about one-third of my full draft. Unknowingly, I had wiped out a large portion of my blogpost. And as any writer can tell you, rewriting what you’ve lost can be profoundly challenging—especially if you have dementia. I could remember almost nothing from the brunt of my lost first draft.
This, of course, was profoundly frustrating. I knew that I was writing well, but I was unable to transfer the information to my long-term memory. Anxiety runs on one side of my family, so it’s no surprise that I would have anxiety problems once I developed Alzheimer’s. But it wasn’t until I developed Alzheimer’s did my anxiety became a problem for me.
What he did struggle with was anxiety. It’s one reason why he didn’t do as well as he might have in his dual careers, in teaching and commercial fishing. How is this connected with dementia?  Because anxiety on its own can be terribly corrosive. To introduce a metaphor from the drug culture, fentanyl, used to speed up the high from opiates, is like adding anxiety to people who already have Alzheimer’s disease. The less stress you have on your shoulders, the better.

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