We arrived just in time for our French movie double feature yesterday, and as I sat down in the comfortable couch arrangement that all good theatres have these days, I reached around behind me to find the seatbelt.
As I realised what I was doing, I froze in horror. I’ve had a few concerns about my brain function this week. When I’m at home or working somewhere I’m comfortable and familiar with, I’m fine. On Tuesday, though, I was rostered to a theatre list I don’t normally work in, and I was stressed the entire day. Yes, the average age of my patients was 84, and both had been assessed at the high risk preassessment clinic, so it was never going to be entirely relaxing, but I was way out of my comfort zone. I felt as if the anaesthetic technician rostered to work in my theatre was watching me with concern the entire day. Although there’s certainly a degree of paranoia in that thought, she did have to correct me a couple of times. I’m not angling to get fired here, so I’m not giving any details, and the patients were always safe. But my experience of the day rattled me greatly.
I value my brain enormously. Being smart is my whole identity. I’ll never be as clever as my mum, but I’ve done alright. I’m not even sixty! I remember being visited by an elderly relative years ago. She seemed not too bad, frail but sprightly, until she took her shoe off and put it on the table, and started putting her mandarin peels into it. She then went to butter her toast, but ended up spreading it directly onto the table top instead. It fills me with horror to think that this behaviour might be in my near future. I know a lot of people struggling with trauma, unexpected deaths, and cancer at the moment, so of course, I shouldn’t complain. But I’ve always pictured myself in thirty years time as an eccentric old lady, living alone with her dogs and chickens. My husband is nowhere to be seen in this fantasy, having finally succumbed either to a lifetime of smoking and drinking, or having run off with some nubile seventy year old hussy.
In no scenario did I picture myself confused and drooling, sitting in the corner of the lounge at some Godforsaken nursing home smelling of pee.
Help me.