Grandma Henke

If that doesn’t beat all.   Last night late I thought of a good story … one I don’t think I’ve ever told … and even knowing how unstable my memory is I didn’t write it down and for the life of me cannot remember it today.   I’m sure it was a tremendous story and hopefully it will come back to me when I have pencil or keyboard in hand.   Don’t you just hate when that happens?

I find that happens to me far more often now than it used to.   The one thing that is predictable about me is that I am likely to forget that which I don’t write down.    To more than one of my grandchildren I am known as “The forgetting grandma”.  Each generation has a vernacular for this phenomenon … from brain farts to senior moments … but in my case it is more than a senior moment and I’m okay with that.

I watched a very interesting show on Discover this week about our brains and memory and was actually relieved to find out my brain is quite normal for my age and circumstance and that most likely I am not in the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s.    They say if you wonder if you have Alzheimer’s you probably don’t because those who have it don’t know they don’t know.   However, I do recall taking Mom in for her exam and failing it miserably while she, who actually was suffering with the disease, passed it with flying colors.    That was kind of an unsettling experience until I remembered I have been that way most of my life.  

When I was a child I fell out of trees, of the monkey bars, and even got knocked out at school when I flew off the “Wave” in the playgrounds.   I spent the rest of the day sleeping on the floor of my 1st grade class and can only remember being awakened by my brothers so I could ride the bus home, which promptly made me throw up.     I can’t remember a lot of that week but I can remember the tremendous headache that made me lie still and try not to move my head because it would make the room spin and the pain unbearable.     Eventually the pain went away and because I was so young no one realized I had a closed traumatic brain injury.

Now that I am older and supposedly wiser I know that I had a traumatic brain injury at that time that affected my short term memory.   I have never been good at pulling up names or places … any kind of noun you have to capitalize.     Even people I know well are not exempt from this temporary burst of “blankness”.    I generally can’t remember the name of the movie I saw the night before, or if I’ve read a book with a familiar cover, or name the characters in my favorite television show.  (I even have to keep a cheat sheet on the books I write myself!)  Over the years I think I have learned to compensate for it quite well but not without times of embarrassment.   

I think we all have our “disabilities” in this life and learn to compensate for them; sometimes so well we don’t even realize ourselves that we have them.     I personally think it is good to know our limitations; not so we can make excuses for ourselves but so we can figure out ways to cope and ways to accomplish what needs done in spite of them.   Most of all I think it is good to know all we can about who we are so we don’t label ourselves with ugly words like stupid.     I definitely know I’m not stupid.   I once took a test (one one of my better memory days) at Work Force Services and was informed I was borderline genius … which I found hard to believe at the time.    Now I realize on certain days I probably am brilliant … other days I am just my forgetful self with the brilliance tucked inside taking a rest.

I didn’t always know so much about my brain.   It wasn’t until my 3rd son, Ryan, suffered a traumatic brain injury that I began to study the brain and realized how vulnerable that gray matter is.     Ryan’s injury was much more serious than mine.   His challenges became apparent immediately and his early years were much more difficult than mine.  Thankfully he, too, has learned to cope and has become a person he is happy to be.  

Now days when I see people doing crazy things without protective head gear I just shudder.     I know much more about trauma to the head than what I have studied from the books.    Most of it can be prevented.    Just as “Buckle Up For Safety” in cars can save lives, wearing a helmet when it is necessary can save your brain.    If I were you … I would.

If you have any questions about traumatic brain injury you can find out much more about it by following this link to Brain Injury Association of America.  They in turn can direct you to an association near you.