Miles's blog

High calorie intake is now associated with memory loss.  Worse yet, the greater the calories the worse the impairment.  Damn, now another reason I have to stop eating all the good stuff.  

Like most people my age (I suffered my 57^th birthday the other day) I find myself forgetting things all the time.  I mean, finding the car is tantamount to a treasure hunt, and lately the keys themselves seem to go wandering around.  Last week I pulled a shopping cart full of groceries up to the back of my car only to realize that my car key had fallen out of my pocket somewhere in the store.  Fortunately, it was still on the floor by the checkout lane.  This was a new one.  Of course, the amount of junk food in the cart was a contributing factor to my losing the key in the first place.  

I already had to worry about diabetes, high blood pressure, stroke, joint pain and innumerable other ailments because of my insatiable sweet tooth, but I was willing to face them all for the psychic benefit of savoring some key lime pie, New York cheesecake, or a anything which contains the words “double” and “chocolate.”  I can accept being in a wheelchair, hooked to a dialysis machine, even being bedridden, but to have to face dementia as penalty, that is just too much.  I will now be relegated to a life of slowly chewing fruit and savoring the occasional flavored yogurt.  

I hate forgetting things.  Memory was always one of my good qualities.  I used to be able to whip out the starting lineup of the 1927 Yankees or name you which case created the public safety exception to the Miranda rule.  Phone numbers, birthdays, even sometimes page numbers of important opinions, they were all filed away awaiting retrieval at a moment’s notice.  An appearance on Jeopardy was achievable (my loss can be blamed more on being obtuse to the question rather than an inability to call up the answer).  But in the past decade things have started to slip.

I went from giving out the name and even citation of a case to doing the “I know there is a case” thing.  People approached me at the fall conference and all I could do was say “Hey” rather than use their name.  I was pretty sure most of them had a name, and that at one point I knew it, but more and more frequently their face drew a complete blank.  I now have trouble remembering who is the Rockies starting third baseman or which DA was convicted of sexually assaulting his staff members.  I forget that Brittany Murphy is dead and Olivia de Havilland is still alive.

Increasingly, I can’t call up the correct word when speaking or writing.  Language had always come easily to me.  The perfect word would always just flow whether I was writing or talking.  I loved that.  Now, I can barely think of words like “erudite” or “mellifluous.”  Sometimes I have trouble with “airplane.”

I am still pretty good with some things.  I have no problem walking into a bakery and asking for a cannoli or éclair.  I should be forgetting those words, but no they are locked in, begging for a chance to be used.  I  have a problem with the names for green vegetables or various fruits.  Sometimes I read about foods like “plantains” or “arugula” and my mind is a complete blank.  I come home from the grocery store with bags of cookies, chips, and ice cream, but seem to have forgotten anything from the produce section.  Or I remember to buy it but forget that those drawers in the bottom of the fridge are more than decorative.

The biggest risk to modern memory loss is computer access.  Every single website has passwords.  Fortunately, my computer remembers most of them, but should my computer break, or I should lose it, or even buy a new one, I am not positive I can retrieve my mail, pay my bills or watch movies.  

So I will have to cut down on everything I eat.  Not just junk food but calories in general.  This is terrible.  2100 calories a day is all I am allowed.  That is just a halftime snack.  I don’t know how I am going to handle this.  Now, why is it again I have to eat less?