Cross words.

Now this is a tricky one, Iv’e been putting it off for so long, for me this one is so hard. I am used to cognitive problems but this takes my brain to a scary place. So basically, I struggle with my words, I can’t bring words to mind and often say different words than my intention. Certain words I have permanently replaced with others. I have tried to make sense of this to find a pattern but I can not.

For example whenever I talk about the bathroom, I call it the kitchen. I try hard to say bathroom but kitchen springs out. I talk about the cat, but call it dog, or I call a dog, cat, all these similar and linked words switch over. Boy becomes girl for example, at least I am in the ball park with these ones, others are more random.

I might be asked ‘where is the ….’ I reply knowing the answer, but instead of saying ‘in the cupboard’ I answer something like ‘ its in the pocket’, when I last said this I was aware I had my hand in my pocket and so thought this had broken my line of thought. Other times I suspect I am saying something that I can see directly rather than what I mean to say.

Its horrible, I know in my head what I want to say yet something different pops out, its very disconcerting. Words matter to me, intellectual capacity is important to me and these symptoms have been hard to adjust to. At times I just can not say the correct word and instead will list a number of words connected to the word I want, like it is a game, describe something without using the word, I should be good at these games but I am not. Eventually who I am talking to will guess the missing word and my conversation can continue, otherwise I use lots of words to say a simple thing, this makes me laugh, having to use numerous words to replace only one.

I have learned to laugh at myself, to relax and go with the flow, its especially funny when a completely unconnected random word comes out. I feel lucky I have a large vocabulary.

My memory is a problem here as well, particularly with names, they vanish from my brain even when I have known someone and there name for my life time. Often I speak of people by their role to cover the fact the name has left me. I can loose my daughter’s name, and the dogs regularly, speaking to the dogs now I generally can say the two names but not to the right dog or at times not at all. Some days its all, ‘come on dog’, or ‘Min, Ink, dog, whatever your name is’. when this happens I can try as I might to get it right but just can not.

I used to be scared of these symptoms but now I am accepting, I avoided talking to strangers and new people for years, but now I just say, ‘its my wonky brain’ although I am making an effort not to down play my illness now, so try to say its my M.E. Many people claim to have the same problems and don’t take it seriously, just one of those ageing things or sufferers of M.E etc refer to Brain fog as an explanation. I hate that term, somehow it just seems too trivial. I have not always had these symptoms, they have increased in the last ten years. At one stage I was referred for tests, these showed that I had a problem in two areas and in these areas I did worsen over time, but generally it was put down to exhaustion. I did not want to accept this but have no choice for now, I just hope that dementia passes me by.

Stuttering and stammering is another thing, somethings I just repeat the ‘T’ sound until a word can come out, not a word beginning with T either. Other times I just ‘ttttttttt’ and can not stop the sound. The blankness inside my head feels strange, like I am hollow, there is nothing and I know nothing. Even now I try to bring up examples to use but I am left blank. Will come back to this one at some point I think. Now it seems that in writing these posts I find it easy to find language, but the secret for me is to use my phone for a thesaurus or I fire words at my daughter until she guesses the missing one that I am thinking of.

Then there is the expletives! Yes the swearing, swear words fly out of me, seemingly coming from nowhere. I think swear words connect to the brain in a visceral way. Tourettes sufferers are often known for unwanted swearing so I think there is something in it. I have never been offended by generalised swearing, which is just aswell. Some days I do have to apologise for myself when all the words slipping out are F words. I can offend people I know, but well fuck it, it can’t be helped.

Here’s to my ever decreasing language skills.

Chris. xx

OOh here’s another regular one, ‘gog’ instead of ‘dog’, ‘dog’ instead of ‘God’.