Memories Lost and Found

Memory is a funny thing...I think.  That's my attempt at humor. I have to make fun of myself or I'd have no relief at all from the teasing and taunting and laughter that comes at me from all sides much of my waking life. But I'm already going off on a tangent-we can't have that! Let's try again.  I can't explain this very clearly, I can only tell the story as it exists in my current state of consciousness.  I remember on a different plane of "reality", which an alternate K presides over, and which sometimes drops us bits of information or pictures in our mind of things from K's past (and sometimes her future!).  Sometimes this works out well, the right version of K will remember what she needs to know, but more often than not, K is unable to retrieve the information and she feels foolish and frustrated and angry with herself. 

It's so embarrassing to not be able to remember someone's name, someone whom you've known for years.  How do you play that down, or get out of that situation gracefully? You really can't.  Blame it on getting older or being intoxicated, anything to keep the truth hidden from the Outside World.  It's reasons like these which cause us to want to stay home.  At least, some of us do, the current K included.  I'm not sure where I've been, but I've been reading the blog and a book I found at the library, and I've determined that K has been having a dissociative episode, and has switched several times over the course of 2 weeks or so.  I'm here now, to try and make sense of all these notes and writings and websites.  This is going to take some work, and some time.  But-in the end, I'm hoping to help K get better, to live a somewhat stable life, to be HAPPY. (K doesn't really know what that means, she only pretends to know)  I've touched on happiness since we got married, actually since we began dating our husband, which was about 4 years ago.  My happiness swelled to such an extent I thought my heart was literally going to burst out of my chest on our honeymoon, and has been present more days than not ever since.  Yes, we still have days in which we're depressed, or want to hurt ourselves, but a lot of days we wake up and look over at our husband and emotions pool inside of us and I can often feel tears run down my cheeks and I know those are tears of joy.  K had such a hard time for so many years of her life, it's just awesome that she's finally found a piece of happiness, a life with purpose, a future worth living to see.

I wonder if K will live to see her future... I don't mean to sound so doom and gloomy but I mean, her health is not so great considering how young she is.  She already has to wear oxygen at night when she sleeps (that's something that came about only recently but is because of the ARDS incident (The story of my ARDS ordeal).  She has COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease) as a result of the ARDS too.  Needless to say, by the time she got out of the hospital, she was a non-smoker.  (It's interesting to note that some of the K's DO smoke)  She recently had exploratory surgery to find the cause of some severe pain she'd been having in her right side for several months.  The surgeon found something called adhesions (the abnormal union of adjacent tissues) growing on her colon and he had to scrape this tissue off her organs.  She was really sore after that, and ran out of pain pills too quickly,  but the doctor refused to refill them.  It's often hard to get some medications, such as pain relievers and sleeping pills, when you have a history of mental illness.  My theory is that the doctors are afraid you'll intentionally take an overdose of the pills.  Or perhaps they believe that people will take advantage of our impaired judgement and we will sell them or give them away.  Now I will confess that on certain nights, rarely, my mother will be so nervous and anxious that she cannot sleep, and on those nights I will give her a quarter of one of my Xanax pills to calm her down and help her relax.  Is that really so wrong?  Mom's always worried she's going to become an addict, which I think is hilarious-she's 82 for Christ's sake!  So what if she DOES get hooked?  What difference would that make now?


Damn! I've gone and forgotten what it was that I wanted to write about tonight.  I HATE when that happens, and unfortunately, it happens a lot.  It's embarrassing and drives me crazy, pun intended.  K used to always have a pad of paper and a pen with her , as well as a sketch book, a pencil, and a fine-point black Sharpie marker.  We got out of that habit at some point when other, less active K's came to visit our mind.and K became lethargic and less inclined to do anything (anything at all by the end of that time period)  I guess after we dropped out of college our mind and memories started to get fuzzy from neglect.  I, and the other smart K's (I don't know how many there are, I'm still figuring all this out), will try and focus our energy on remembering what to blog about.  OH YES, and we've begun to carry a pad of paper and a pen in our pocket at all times now.  I think that's as good a place to start as any. If you want to remember, write it down. If I find some notes or remember something on the subject later, I"ll be sure and post those thoughts  here.