What’s In A Word?

If you’re like me, you’ll struggle to find the word. You might just hit a blank, and not for the life of you be able to come up with the word you want, or maybe you might blurt out a completely different word than the one you intended. Where did that come from?

It’s called brain fog. Or cognitive dysfunction. Or cognitive impairment. Maybe specific to your illness, it might be fibro(myalgia) fog or maybe chemo(therapy) fog. I’m sure there are others related to other illnesses. I battle with brain fog thanks to two chronic illnesses (fibromyalgia and Graves’ Disease).

They said it might be a problem when I have a flare of my fibro, but actually, it is a constant for me.

I used to be paid to talk. I was employed to train people how to be managers, and so I was either in front of a classroom, talking all day, or other days I might be on the telephone for most of the day planning training programmes.  Even outside of my work, I talked. Leading groups.

I spoke fluently, without hesitation. It didn’t worry me whether I was speaking to one person or 200. Much of my speaking was off-the-cuff and I would only have minimal notes to guide me. I was good at this. It was my chosen career until severe mental illness cut me down, but that’s another story.

Now, I struggle to string a sentence together. I stutter, I hesitate, I lose the words I want to use, or completely wrong words come out of my mouth. It doesn’t matter whether I speak to one person or a group, I am constantly battling my brain to come out with the right words at the right time.

I feel like an idiot. I imagine what people must think of me. They would have no idea that I am actually an intelligent person because I really do sound like an idiot.

Worse yet, is speaking to people for whom English is their second language. Most of the staff in the dementia facility where my mother lives are immigrants. My problem is that I struggle so much to say what I want to say, but if they don’t understand me, I have to start all over again. They are trying to guess what I want to say, and I get flustered and my speech gets worse.

I am so frustrated by this today but it is like this every day. My inclination is to isolate myself, so that I don’t have to speak. But I can’t do that. I don’t want to answer the phone and actually fear that it will ring.

This is a constant problem for me. Anxiety is up, so is depression because I am so frustrated with the simple task of speaking. For those who think I should be out there working, I couldn’t work. I couldn’t do my job, because my job is talking. I retrained as a social worker, but wouldn’t manage to do that either. I just constantly stumble over my words. (By the way, there are other substantial barriers to me working, but my speech is just one more invisible problem.)

And that isn’t the Cate I always knew. What the f*ck happened to her?

Thanks for reading

 

Cate