This sums up the past few days:
Can dementia cause multiple personalities?
Alzheimer's patients can experience fluctuating personality changes, becoming extremely confused, suspicious, fearful or dependent on a family member.
I ticked every single box like the good little 'box ticker' I am. It’s been really confusing, scary, lonely and desperately sad from my end.
Time seemed to be moving forward and backward. I believed I lived in the past and the present - it was extremely disconcerting. I kept trying to file everything around me in order to make sense of everything. I have spent two days putting the house back into something akin to order.
It turns out that hallucinations really are very real for the person having them. I had some fabulous conspiracy theories bubbling and they all seemed to involve islands. I only needed two things that fitted together to begin a ‘theory’. I think my brain was actually just trying to cling to anything, anything at all. It was exhausting!
I suspect it was even more exhausting for those loved ones who went along with all my ravings. They lovingly never left me alone (for obvious reasons) and when I posted a poem about death by Emily Dickinson I think they got really worried. I thought I had just gotten really popular overnight, bless my wee brain :-)
Rest assured almost all her poetry is about death in some form or another. I just had just watched the TV Show Dickinson and quite liked the scene where an actual character representing "death" picks Emily Dickinson's character up for a date in his carriage and then deposits her back home again, alive and well.
I will post the poem again if that is OK, its still a beautiful one and it was written by a very unique and quirky human, just like me.
Rest assured I am not suicidal, I have far too much to do! I want every minute I can possibly get out of this life. You should see my current list of things to do, its very LONG.
Thankfully I only have vague memories and I have asked to keep it that way, I cringe to think what I did or said but I know from research it will only make me feel guilty. I don't really have anything to be guilty about - its just my nuerons firiing or misfiring depending on how you look at it. I was literally 'out' of my mind.
My meds have now been altered and I have been restored to myself again which has lasted for 48 hours and counting. Long may that continue!!
I'm going to sign off with one of my favourite quotes from one of my most treasured books The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. Given I am often up in the middle of the night and frankly my brain is a bit like a circus at the moment; it seemed fitting.
It reads:
Stories have changed, my dear boy,” the man in the grey suit says, his voice almost imperceptibly sad.
“There are no more battles between good and evil, no monsters to slay, no maidens in need of rescue. Most maidens are perfectly capable of rescuing themselves in my experience, at least the ones worth something, in any case.
There are no longer simple tales with quests and beasts and happy endings. The quests lack clarity of goal or path. The beasts take different forms and are difficult to recognize for what they are.
And there are never really endings, happy or otherwise. Things keep overlapping and blur, your story is part of your sister’s story is part of many other stories, and there in no telling where any of them may lead.
Good and evil are a great deal more complex than a princess and a dragon, or a wolf and a scarlet-clad little girl. And is not the dragon the hero of his own story?
Is not the wolf simply acting as a wolf should act? Though perhaps it is a singular wolf who goes to such lengths as to dress as a grandmother to toy with its prey.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus