Sample

Sticks and stones may break my bones
But names will never hurt me.

My empty lunchbox lay on the passenger’s seat as I left the picturesque lay-by in rural south-west Scotland and a thought occurred to me. I could not remember the names of the children I had taken to the Sheriff Court that morning.
I had conducted the case of two children whose parents denied the grounds for referral and the Sheriff had found the cases established but all of a sudden, I could not remember the names of the children concerned. I turned off the car radio, concentrated hard but the names just would not come. I drove on to the next lay-by, switched off the car engine and gave it one last effort. Defeated, I took my case from the back seat and opened it. The names on the files stared at me. How could this have happened? I put it down to over work …well…. yes… I suppose stress but so what? Were we not all stressed in this frantic new millennium?
The following month, driving back from the supermarket, somehow the road did not seem familiar. I drove on and turned left at the lights hoping to find more familiar territory. I must have driven for a further three minutes before I realised where I was in the town where I had lived in for the past twelve years.
Once more I justified the confusion in my mind. After all, apart from being the head of department, I was the chair of two other organisations and had just been appointed to chair the child protection committee in the area in which I worked.
I made an appointment with my general practitioner who would be bound to see the stress symptoms of my self diagnosis and give me a period of time to recover on sick leave. The garden would benefit. The dog would have an additional afternoon walk. I could read all the books I had put aside for a wet day and the piano and the oboe would have more regular practice. It was really a question of how long I would be given. Colleagues with similar symptoms had often been given three or four months. Four months would take me to early summer. Perhaps the house would really have a spring clean on time this year. It was time to get things back in order. The unnecessary stigma of stress was diminishing. I was beginning to welcome my self- diagnosis because I knew its medication was simply rest.
In reality, my diagnosis was wide of the mark! My doctor wished me to undergo a series of medical examinations. First came the clinical psychiatrist whose questions seemed so mundane that it was like a social meeting rather than a consultation until he concluded the appointment with a referral to a clinical psychologist and an appointment was also made for a brain scan.
The photographic slices of my brain and its apparent dormant activity were sent to the psychologist and an appointment was made for an hour’s testing.
Fifteen unconnected words were recited to me and repeated before I attempted to recall the list. Somehow after considerable concentration, only two words surfaced. I could not remember any more. The list was read out again and this time I focussed on the middle of the list but could only recall four words and neither of the original two that I had got correctly after the first round, reappeared. A different list was recited and I fared no better. I was simply unable to recollect these lists despite conducting a two-way conversation ably with the psychologist.
‘Count down from 93 in 7’s please.’ Now whose brain at the best of times works like that? I can recite any of the multiplication tables and divide or add but leave subtraction in multiples of 7 to the pocket calculator. I struggled here with the subtraction. Wouldn’t you?
‘Give me 15 unrelated words and no proper names, beginning with the letter ‘F’. Oh F--- why F? I momentarily mused at the psychologist’s choice of letter. Yet the words fell frequently from a flowing mind. ‘Failure, fraud, faded, faults, facts, figures, frigidity, fortune, fables, fixtures, fractures, football, furniture, freeze and frost’. I felt satisfied that I had not only found enough words but was able to count the right number required. I had used my fingers under the table!
‘Umm some negative thoughts predominating there. Try the same with the letter ‘S’’
I go full steam ahead again making his point redundant. ‘Sex, satisfaction, success, siblings, savoury, sailing, sunshine, snow, silver, sumptuous, seafood, shade, sunbeams, softness and to finish with, star!’ Other tests followed. Which floor was I on in the building? Then a game of placing difficult shapes into a sequenced order. The going got tougher. I found it an increasing challenge.
The conclusion of this appointment resulted in the diagnosis of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), a condition I had never heard of. I had to write it down on a piece of paper. There were apparently two sources of my condition and neither could be adequately isolated.
The first was that I had been prescribed for high blood pressure medication two years previously and the HBP may have led to a short-term memory default. The other source was confirmed as the consequences of a near fatal operation some four years ago when, one Sunday evening, I was taken to hospital suffering an appendix pain. This operation which is not uncommon in youth, results in surgery which usually leaves a scar of little significance. Unfortunately by the time the surgeon operated on me that evening, peritonitis had set in and the penetrating surgical knife was met by bacterial infection spread throughout the abdominal cavity. Significant levels of anaesthesia were administered as the operation progressed. The increased amount of anaesthetic undoubtedly saved my life as the surgeon informed me the next day while inspecting the twenty two metal staple stitches on my stomach but the additional anaesthetic may also have caused damage to my short- term memory. Without it however, I would have died.
The implications for my work were stark. I could not afford to place a child’s life at risk if my memory was sufficiently damaged or if I forgot case law or if a child’s warrant lapsed due to my failing memory. The psychologist agreed, retiral on ill health grounds was deemed necessary. He would make a further appointment with an occupational physician and assess me every six months to see how my memory was responding.
By the time I had seen the occupational physician, I knew that my professional working life was over. It was nevertheless a valuable meeting at which the arrangements for adaptation to early retirement financially, emotionally and medically were addressed.

So, at the age of 52, after a working life which had encompassed five years in West Africa as a missionary, four years in Stirling as an educational social worker, and twenty years as a reporter to the children’s panels in Kilmarnock, Ayr and latterly Dumfries, I had retired. I had retired due to a diagnosis of ill health. Retired with MCI. I looked up this medical term on the internet. I was not familiar with it.


Researchers are attempting to clarify the boundaries between the memory effects of normal ageing and the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. Cognitive function, abilities such as language, critical thinking, reading and writing, is measured on a continuum between normal and early signs of the disease. This transitional area in the continuum has been labelled mild cognitive impairment – a memory disorder that is a strong early predictor of Alzheimer’s disease. It is estimated that there are nearly four million Americans who have Alzheimer’s disease. But the number of people who have mild cognitive impairment is still unknown. Studies to determine its prevalence are just beginning. What’s more, doctors often use varying criteria when making their diagnosis. Therefore, reliable numbers aren’t yet available to determine how common MCI may be.
MCI refers to a specific type of memory loss. People with this disorder have sharp thinking and reasoning skills, but their short-term memory declines. Typically, people with the disorder have the most trouble remembering recently acquired information and knowledge, while their recall of long ago events may remain intact.
The area of the brain responsible for processing storing and recalling new knowledge and information is the hippocampus. You have one at each side of the brain. It is located toward the middle in each of the temporal lobes – portions of your brain that extend from beneath your temples to just behind your ears.
The hippocampus plays a crucial role in your memory system by sorting new information and sending it to other sections of your brain for storage. The hippocampus then recalls information when it’s needed. It also connects your new memories with other related memories. Just like my Google searches and entering my favourite links!
So in a nutshell, as it were, my condition of MCI is summed up as being a Sharp Mind, Shaky Memory. Useful signposts but where would this lead me? But first, what really is Memory?

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