My Lyme Brain

The third party guest that isn't welcome in my brain but has made itself at home is what I call my "Lyme Brain".

My Lyme Brain is also due to the fact that my brain has so much inflammation that my cognitive brain can be compared with Dory from Finding Nemo. Ok, maybe not so bad that I forget who my family is. But it is almost as comical. I find that I will be in conversations and people will be talking to me and I will have no idea what has been said. I will go into a room 5 times looking for something and forget every single time what I was getting. And at first I thought it was just me having a slower brain, or me being a little bit spacey but it has gotten pretty ridiculous and frustrating. And I have begun to realize that it is much more then a blonde moment, or a sign that I am getting older.

Things like forgetting to brush my teeth in the morning. Something that a normal person will do everyday without needing a constant reminder, I forget, it just totally spaces. On the weekends, when I don't have a set routine like I do more so during the week, I will forget to eat, and then I wonder why I feel like I'm going to pass out.

There is a doctor, Rober Bransfeild, and he has done studies on Lyme Disease And Cognitive Impairments, and there are people that have it worse than me. He talks of a patient he has that can make 13/15 free throws, but now he has Lyme Disease and he have maybe make 5/15! I pray it never gets that serious. But Dr. Bransfeild talks about how the attention span is effected, and I sometimes wonder if I have ADHD because I am so spacey some days. He talks about organizing and planning and memory and how Lyme effects the brain in all the Cognitive ways in a pretty negative way.

There are some people that have had Lyme for so long that they have been diagnosed with dementia  and even early Alzhimers disease. Luckily I'm blessed to not have things go that far, but sometimes I feel lost in conversations and I truly wonder if my brain is aging faster than everything else!

My Doctor, in my last appointment, when I voiced that I hadn't had a chance to read the book that he had recommended for me to read, he asked me if I wasn't reading because I couldn't because my brain couldn't handle it, because it was slower than usual. I explained that I thought it was because I didn't have the motivation, not because of my Lyme Brain which not being motivated is more of a depression side. 

But as I think on it more, even though I do know that I have no motivation to pick up even my most favorite of books, I wonder if part of it is because I don't have the brain capacity that comes with an overloaded and inflamed Lyme Brain. Because reading is turning out to be a struggle for me like learning has become as well.

Almost everyday I go to lunch with my dad and we talk basketball. We watch videos of the offense we will teach the girls to run this year at the high school. Learning this new offense isn't hard, I understand it. But remembering it, in finding is super difficult. And me and my dad are trying to come up with different drills to help teach this offense and simplify it. But as we sit at lunch and try and figure it out, I find myself getting more and more lost. I sort of pretend to know what I'm talking about as I try to explain what makes sense in my brain and what I understand, but toke it come out I find it is becoming extremely difficult. And as the season begins this week, I worry about how well I actually do understand the offense, if at all. Because I can't follow my dad drawing up a simple play on the board, all the "X's" and "O's" start to run together and I find myself asking in my head "wait, which one are we again?" And then I'm lost.

All in all, this symptom, I'm afraid, is just starting show up. Or at least I'm just beginning to notice it's appearance as an unwelcome guest, and I hope that it doesn't not become more prominent in the future. Otherwise they could just cast me as a real life Dory!

-The Lyme Warrior