Brain Games

Watching my mother's onward march towards complete, debilitating dementia is a horrifying experience. It's painful to see what she is going through, more painful to know how much worse it's going to get, beyond any pain scale to know that it will kill her. It's also a little terrifying to think of the implications on my own future. Dementia is not always inherited, but there are no good treatments or cures.

So, I did what any reasonable person would do, I bought a book. It's a book of daily math exercises called Train Your Brain, written by the same guy who founded the Kumon workbooks for kids. I took the pre-tests yesterday, that was a little unnerving. Then I did Day 1. 100 simple arithmetic problems, nothing greater than the number 20, no division, multiplying single digits only. It took me 2 minutes and 54 seconds. It took Mark less than a minute. I'm not even on the chart for good brain functioning according to the book! Today I shaved an entire second off my time, so that made me feel better.

Before my father was hospitalized at the end of June, his Parkinson's was progressing and he was suffering greatly from malnutrition and dehydration. Failure to thrive was the code on the ambulance sheets. At one point he told my sister that we should feel free to have both he and my mother undergo cognitive testing if we felt there was a need. That morning he had failed to easily divide in his head 24,836 by 127. I can't even remember what 7 times 6 is and he is worried about dividing five digits by three. Of course, now that he has regular hydration and calories through his tube, his brain is functioning just fine. Mine will never function as well and I'm nearly 40 years behind him.