Got some ... "unsettling" is the right word ... news to discuss. I seem to be missing...sort of.
Kathy and I both noticed the changes right away. After my heart surgery, I wasn't quite me. As Kipling would have said, "He just wasn't quite exactly." Things kind of went away.
Let me be honest, I found out early on that I have a high IQ and have always taken a certain pride in my mental acuity. With a high IQ eventually comes the realization -- no, the arrogance -- that you could run mental rings around others.
Hasn't done me any real good, truth be told.
I've had a thoroughly mediocre career, discovered no cancer cures, accumulated no millions, had no libraries named after me, blazed no trails. Fact is, we -- searching for a good descriptive noun here -- "Mentalated" (I just invented a word!) people are a huge group of underachievers. For that matter, prisons and unemployment rolls are full of Mensa members.
Much of that high IQ is determined by one's ability to recall and apply crappy-little-all-but-useless details: How do Boyle's Laws apply; what really is "C"; who was LBJ's vice president; what exactly is the pluperfect subjunctive case or an intransitive verb; what do I have to do tomorrow; ? It's as though your mind were a vast spiderweb, and crappy little details just get caught in it.
Well, I seem to have lightened my Spidey Senses of some of that mental load since my surgery.
There is a syndrome called Postperfusion Syndrome, (or"Pumphead Syndrome" in the physicians' locker rooms,) that happens to people like me who've spent 4-5 hours on an operating table while a heart/lung pump kept my body alive.
What is lost is a certain amount of your ability to process and to remember.
And this is not like standard old-age forgetfulness, when you can't remember something but it perches there just beyond the tip of your tongue.
This is a vacuum... an absence.
Ever been in an airliner at night? You can tell you're flying over a large body of water, because it's absolutely black and vacant, outlined by lights and trees and texture on the shore. You can only see the absence because of the glowing activity around it.
This is like that. These are vacant spots where I know some part of me used to live.
Not sure what was there in those black holes. But I know I'm not the same. And I can't really tell where those black absences are until I mentally bump into the "shore" of one. I feel like a ship's captain back in the Age of Sail groping his way carefully through uncharted waters, not sure of where the reefs and shoals are.
OK ... since some of my kids are doubtless going to panic at this, please don't panic until I give the word ... or the grunt ... or the hand signal ... or something.
I'm hardly a shambling wreck, drooling on his (untied) shoes. I can do (just about) everything I could do before my surgery; talk, take care of myself, process thoughts, have opinions, recognize people, shoot the hell out of the X-ring at a rifle range.
I can feel the absences, though...the "hollow spots" ...
The Duke University followed subjects through a five-year period after their heart surgeries. Results were inconclusive as to whether their mental acuity loss was progressive and got worse over the years.
This doesn't feel like that. It doesn't feel like it's getting worse.
It just feels like parts of me are missing and probably aren't coming back ... ever.
