Indecent Exposure

When I was in high school, I started to get forgetful and began misplacing things. I never really thought anything of it, just that I had too many things going on in my life and wasn’t able to keep track of everything. It came into focus, however, when I became sick with an unidentifiable illness. I had been feeling under the weather for a week or so, with increasing joint pain and a slowly climbing fever. When I woke up and the thermometer read 104, my mother decided it was time to keep me home from school and drag me to the doctor. I was poked and prodded, and he decided that I was depressed, the join pain was a result of the depression, and the depression was caused because I didn’t want to leave for college. My mother rolled her eyes, pointed out that she was a psychologist, she would likely have picked up on something indicating that I was depressed, and that I couldn’t wait to leave the house and go to college (I pretty much started counting down my sophomore year of high school). Two days later, my fever was up to 105.5, and back I went to the doctor, where, once again, he insisted that I was making myself ill as a result of depression. My mother was discussing my symptoms with a coworker, who commented that it sounded similar to when she had Lyme disease. Doing some quick research online and realizing that I did spend all my summers working at a camp in the hills of Pennsylvania teaching girls how to ride horses, sleeping in tents in the tick-infested woods, I was once again dragged to the doctor where my mother insisted that I be tested for Lyme disease. The doctor assured my mother that it was not the case, but finally due to my mother’s persistence, drew blood. Sure enough, when the ELISA and Western blot testing results came back with an incredibly high titer, I was finally diagnosed with late persistent Lyme disease, meaning I had the disease likely for two or three years, and it had never been diagnosed. Suddenly the memory loss and confusion made sense, as the infection spread to my spinal cord and resulted in a slew of nervous system problems.

Even after several rounds of treatment and eventually managing the disease, the associated arthritis and neural problems persist. I’ve learned to deal with them; however, I was always warned if I noticed things worsening in either area to get myself to a doctor right away. There have always been moments ever since then, such as the time I was changing the water in my fishbowl my freshman year of college, and when all was said and done, put the fish and the fishbowl in the refrigerator and the Brita pitcher on the shelf (lucky for the fish, my next-door neighbor wandered in and inquired about the sudden absence of the fish before he had the chance to freeze to death). Usually, however, it’s been isolated incidences and I haven’t worried. Now, however, I’m not so sure.

I’ve had many more problems this year with concentration – I can spend 2 hours reading a chapter from my cell book, and then have no recollection of about which pathway I was just reading. I accounted it to a general lack of interest. I’ve noticed a drastic decrease in my spelling abilities of regular everyday words (I typed out ‘green tea’ as ‘grean tee’ the other day), but I figured that as phrases such as ‘aminoimidazole carboxamide ribonucleotide transformylase’ (and their associated spellings) become part of everyday language, you just have to push out something else. I’ve been putting things in the wrong places again, like putting the cumin in the refrigerator and the lime juice in the cabinet. But hey, I’m overworked and stressed out, so that’s expected, right?

This morning started out exactly like every other morning. My alarm went off, I crawled out of bed, opened the curtains, and neatly made my bed and fluffed my pillows. I ate a yogurt while checking my email and browsing ESPN.com. Sick of my unruly frizzy hair, I took the time this morning to flat iron it. I put on a cashmere Faire Isle belted cardigan over an ivory silk camisole, and my ballet flats covered with platinum-colored sequences which always result in so many complements. I put on a pearl necklace and my pearl earrings, packed up my lunch, and tossed my laptop into my tote bag. As I was heading out of my room, I slipped on my favorite spring jacket, a three-quarter length ivory colored jacket with tiny pastel flowers embroidered across the fabric. I was feeling pretty well put together for the day and was halfway through the living room when I paused, because I felt like I was missing something. I thought for a moment, and dashed back into my room to grab my medical center ID badge. I went to clip it onto my pocket just like always, when I was surprised to discover that there was no pocket on which to clip the ID badge… there was no pocket, because I wasn’t wearing any pants. Yes, that’s right. My pants were still lying across the chair where I had set them out when I decided what to wear. I put on my sweater, my shoes, my jewelry, straightened my hair… and forgot to put on pants.

I’ve known for a while that I needed to call up a neurologist because I just wasn’t all there mentally anymore, but I kept coming up with excuses. That’s it – no more excuses, it’s time to call. It’s not just forgetting where I left my Palm Pilot anymore. When it’s forgetting something as socially required as, say, pants, it’s time to acknowledge that there’s a real problem. After all, as Mark Twain once said, “Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.”