Demented Perspectives: Reality is getting thicker....

I swear sometimes Randy and I must have been separated at birth....ok so it was a helluva birth and took 3000 miles and over a year to complete but here we are. We both have LBD, our progressions are close in some ways and far in others. I am in a bit of a fog so cannot make this really clear but if I suddenly started spouting flames out of my ass and called Randy to tell him, it would surprise me in the least if he finished my sentence.

But what really intrigues me is this:

Dementia is brain-damage, an altering of the senses and cognitive abilities and because its random, there is a lot of variability from patient to patient. That altered reality is usually not only unique to the individual, how that person interprets it and expresses it is unique to them and their individual background; life experience in other words.

Also, because each perspective on dementia is unique, I figure its often not worth mentioning unless I know someone else has that too; then the misery loves company thing kicks in. Otherwise my perspective on my dementia won't mean shit to any other patient as theirs might seem quite different.

So when Randy and I both experience something so odd, so alien to the normal persons sense, and then we connect and describe it almost exactly the same (conceptually we were exactly the same), its kind of a trip. And its nice to know I am not the only one to feel this....

When you start down the road to dementia, the cognitive mistakes are individual events, nothing more. However when enough of things break down, it can make everything you do or experience in a day either hard, really hard or impossible...and when so many things present so much resistance, it feels to us like reality has gotten thicker for us because it takes so much effort to get through a day of "reality". We are exhausted at the end from having to over-deal with piddly things and being defeated by things that were only difficult a year ago. Failing alot is also a wearying experience.

The fun part is that this week I was trying to describe this to Beth for the first time as reality feels like it has thickened a great deal and the effort to get through it each day can sometimes be more than I have...then two days later I get a letter from Randy (where I had told him none of this yet) and right in paragraph one, there was another mind clicking down the same path as my own. He referred to it as

"Swimming through molasses more so than normal."

Wow. He always was better at it than I was but its just strange to me that two folks who have never met, who are perceiving something few others can and of those few, none are talking. Yet here we were doing it.....again. Not the first time but still...

Just to show I am not a total downer, let me leave you with a bit of the anime classic Black Lagoon (Rasta Blasta story arc) cleverly edited and set to the SpiderBait version of "Black Betty"...

Enjoy. If you like this, the series is a whole lotta fun, though dark near the end...