The Hitch

         "Do I make the marks for an f this way?" she asked, drawing short lines with her pen above the paper. I nodded and answered yes, rather quietly. She made the marks on the right side of the upright line.

         We were sitting in the waiting room of the diagnostic imaging facility at Presbytarian Hospital. Mom had printed the information sheet up to the point where she had to fill in a blank line which asked her to to designate her sex. She printed an F on the blank line, and shakily continued to write necessary information.

         She knew everything else, even her former husband's social security number from memory. But just for a minute, she forgot how to make an "F."

         After the tech finished the x-rays of her hip and thigh, she was in tremendous pain. Her hip may be broken. That's a far more urgent matter than following up on thing's that I notice that are different about her these days.

         I know that I was dyslexic as a kid, because Mom kept many of my school papers. I found a spelling test from first grade where I had spelled girl and dog incorrectly--my version being "gril and bog." By the time I finally realized I was dyslexic, in my 20's, I had developed my own learning style adjustments. Nowadays, schools have specialists to deal with learning problems like dyslexia.

         If this type of problem occurs in older adults, it's a possibly significant indicator that the individual has had a stroke. For a period of time an area of the brain was deprived of the oxygen-rich blood flow we all depend on for full physicaland mental functioning ability.

         The area deprived of oxygen becomes damaged, like a fresh rose cut from the garden. Deprived of the growing plant's own flow of sappy water, it must be housed in a container of water or the rose will begin to wither and die. And so it is with some area of the brain; during a stroke a section of the brain has withered, and is in the process of becoming non-functional.

         In order to maintain my sanity, I overcompensate by technocratically logical explanations of the situation in order to distance myself from what's happening. If I can use my brain to explain something by my way of creating ideas and generating writing, I don't have any brain room left to process my feelings of fear.