Friday

This will come as no surprise to many of you...

...but for the record I'll make it official - I am an air-head.


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I've considered lately, with a bit of anxiety I might add, the possibility that I have early onset dementia, but the truth is that my air-headedness is nothing new - and in that I find great relief. I've noticed that my air-headedness is selective. I have the ability to forget to do things that: (a) I REALLY don't want to do, (b) require too many steps to accomplish, (c) are a change in well-established routines, and (d) ONLY have to do with me.

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Let me illustrate. If I really, really, really don't want to do something, I will honestly forget to do it. Quite some time ago, I was chosen to be part of the first open-heart surgery team at a hospital where I worked in the intensive care unit. It will please my readers to know, I'm sure, that I was not air-headed as a registered nurse. I took pride in my professionalism and paid close attention to every detail. I loved nursing, my co-workers, and my patients, but I did not love public speaking. When the hospital administration scheduled me to speak to a group of other hospital nurses about my experience as the ICU open-heart recovery nurse, I simply forgot to show up. Honest.
 
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And if a task has too many steps and I don't have everything I need on hand to complete them, I often forget to continue. It isn't that I don't want to complete them, I just get bogged down in the middle, other projects and events come along to distract me, I lose valuable components, and then I forget to finish what I started way back when. My illustrations are too numerous to mention.

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My friend Jane and I work together to help an elderly widow friend in our community. Once a week we help her get a shower and clean her house. Occasionally we also take her to physical therapy, the doctor's office or hair appointments. Once the schedule has been determined, I have no problem remembering who is doing what when, but if we change it, I'm lost. Just a few weeks ago Jane needed me to take our friend to physical therapy on a day she was scheduled to do so, and I totally forgot. Totally. I'm determined to not let that happen again. I plaster my computer screen with sticky notes the night before and have my google calendar send me an email and special alert message. A last minute change in the schedule for this week meant that today I needed to take our friend to physical therapy and to the doctor's office afterwards for a B-12 shot. I had to laugh when early this morning I read the reminder message I had written last night: "Take JT to PT then to DR to get SHOT." Considering the consequences of getting shot, Casey wondered if the PT might be pointless.
 
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Which brings me to my final and most embarrassing air-headed illustration. I truly pay very little attention to myself. I forget when I take medications, when I need to make appointments, how long my contacts have been in (30 days is good), and apparently, which contact lens goes in which eye. Yesterday I had a regularly scheduled 6-month eye appointment during which it was discovered that my distance vision, which has never been good, was so bad that I wouldn't pass a driver's license test, all because sometime over the last 6 months I switched the lenses and began wearing the contact for distance vision on my dominant eye and the contact for near vision on the eye I was supposed to be wearing the distance vision lens.
 
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I can explain. I really can, but it's a long story, and though my eye doctor and his staff assured me that I am not the first person to do this, I do wonder if after I left the office they looked at each other and said, "What an air-head!"