Found And Lost, Part 10

 (Amber - Mannheim Steamroller)

Alzheimer's Disease ate my father's brain one horrific bite at a time.  It was content to take smaller bites in the beginning, and went largely unnoticed -- or unacknowledged -- by those in his immediate proximity.  

Including him.

Those of us who had dealt with it in other situations knew something was happening.  Circumstances meant that we could only watch it happen and wait.  There were a variety of things that we might have done for him, with him, had those circumstances been different.

Alas.

My siblings and I are all painfully aware of the illness now.  We are painfully aware of the fact that one of us could have inherited it genetically. 

Naturally, as the sibling most frequently regarded as being 'like him', this didn't help matters where the other guy in the mirror was concerned.  It just made it worse.  Logically, what I was seeing was almost certainly a product of my weight loss...

Unless it wasn't.

Anyone who has experience with dementia will understand how much of a nightmare a simple mirror can be.

----------

"Your face is changing," my wife reassured me.  "I've been able to see it for months now.  I'm not surprised that you haven't noticed the little changes though."

We were both standing in my office at home talking through the situation.  We talked about it a lot.  Or maybe we talked about it enough. Even talking about it once was more than I was comfortable with, but I'd long ago learned that keeping these kinds of secrets from your significant other was half the journey to ruining a relationship.

Cliche as it is, my wife is my best friend.  She knew most of my secrets before we ever got married.

She knew about the litany of 'what if' that was rolling through my head.  She knew that I was wondering if this is where it had started with my father.  Everyone had been so insistent that I was like him. 

"Your face is changing," she said again, quieter this time.  She moved her hands slowly, tracing fingertips around the slowly growing hollows under my cheekbones, around the line of my jaw, and the orbits surrounding my eyes.  "Here, and here...and here."  She always moved her hands slowly.  It had been a labor spanning many years to get me to the point where I wouldn't immediately pull my head away from her hand when it was near my eyes.

"Come with me."  She took one of my hands and led me into the bathroom next door.  There, she turned on the lights and said, "Look."  Then she traced my face again. "Weight is coming off here...and here, and here.  That's why it looks different."  She tapped the bottom of my chin with a finger and I tilted my head up automatically.

My wife helps me shave a lot.  Turns out, I can't shave a straight line to save my life.  We'd done it enough times that I'd gotten used to simply moving my head when she nudged it like that.  And who would argue when someone else had sharp steel that close to their throat?

When I tilted my head up, the shadows on my face disappeared.  The other guy started to blur away like some kind of circus illusion.  "Puff out your cheeks a tiny bit," she murmured.  I did, and the other guy vanished entirely.  Suddenly, I was looking back at myself again.

The science of it all made it...easier.

I knew what she was showing me.  I understood it, and probably should have been ... put together enough to perform the exercise on my own.

Fear makes us stupid sometimes.

"You told him you wanted to talk about stuff, right?"  I nodded.  "I've got an hour on his schedule instead of our usual 20 minutes."  My wife nodded back.  "Good.  He's going to tell you exactly what I told you.  Hopefully, you'll listen."

I ducked my head a little and we hugged each other for a time in silence.

Anyone that knows my wife knows that she's been through some serious shit in her life.  I didn't want to add to that.  I didn't want to be the next person she had to take care of and be strong for.  It was supposed to be the other way around.

Something else broke in me and I whispered, "I wanted to be better than this for you."

She squeezed me tighter and murmured, "You're an idiot.  You already are."

----------

It was early March.  I only had another two weeks until I could speak with my psychologist about this whole thing.  It would be better once I did.  He had helped me fix one problem.  He could help with this.

Then we made the mistake of turning the news on, and it became very clear that it was going to be a long time before I saw anyone.

----------

If Morgan Freeman were here, he would say something about how COVID time is slow time, so you do what you can to keep going.

The initial paranoia associated with the spread of the coronavirus meant that walking around outside became a nervous affair.  Walking around in the grocery store became inadvisable.  

By the time April had rolled around and the world had well and truly started losing its mind, I had gotten so used to walking that suddenly not walking was driving me absolutely insane.  I had excess energy that I couldn't get out in the manner I was used to.  I fell back on resistance bands, cobbling workout routines together for as long as I could tolerate them.  They worked well enough for my upper body but there wasn't a good space in the house to do them for my lower body.  Worse, some of the setup required for movements like Pulldowns involved kneeling, and my knees weren't having that at all.

I would sneak out from time to time at night, after everyone had sought the safety of their homes from both the virus and the darkness.  I was less concerned with the latter for obvious reasons.  It wasn't a substitute for my usual routine, but it was something.  Anything.

It had been made very clear to me that while we had managed to get my engine up and running, no one was confident about what might happen if I allowed it to stop.

The bariatric center continued to call me, of course.  They were offering tele-visits with specialists and walk-in visits if I thought the matter was urgent.  Right, wrong, or otherwise, I certainly didn't think I rated high enough to them at risk.  From my specialists to the nurses and the receptionist, I'd grown fond of just about everyone in that office.  The thought of somehow getting them sick was... unpleasant.

The tele-health visits were an option, of course, but there was no way to get me anywhere near the scale if we did that.  I had a love/hate relationship with that scale now.  I knew it wasn't wise to solely depend on it for inspiration, and I'd gone through enough changes with my body to understand that there were plenty of other indicators that I was, in fact, still losing weight.

There was no debating the impact that the scale had though.

Plus, my psychologist's office was...safe.  There's a reason why people still go to church even though God is supposed to be everywhere.  Somewhere along the line, the bariatric center had become holy ground for me.

So I waited.  And time passed.  Slowly.

----------

June arrived, and I realized that I had a problem.  

With summer fully in swing, I started getting summer clothing out.  Much to my amazement, most of it no longer fit me properly.  I couldn't keep shorts up without the vigorous aid of a belt, some of my more casual oxfords were positively huge on me, and my track pants wouldn't stay up regardless of how tightly I tied them.

I hate shopping.  Or, perhaps it's better to suggest that I hate spending money on clothing when I could easily just use duct tape or twine to make what I have serve its purpose.  We were in the middle of COVIDland anyway, so why did I need to worry about how I looked?  I could make my current wardrobe work, right?

Like most things in my life, it was my wife that ended up being the voice of reason.  "Some of these articles of clothing have been around longer than I have. Make an appointment for a session at your clothier, put a damn mask on, and go buy a new wardrobe.  You've earned it."

The excuses began:

- My current clothing still works just fine! ...ish!
- I don't want to spend the money!
- I'm still losing weight!  Why buy more clothing now?
- Why waste perfectly good clothing?
- ...I hate shopping!

My wife's response to this was to boldly march into my closet with a pair of clothing shears.

Soooo, I went shopping the next day.  My reward for this was discovering that I was now at least a full size, if not two sizes, smaller than I used to be in most of my clothing.  Small victories.  That was telling enough that I was continuing to lose weight even though I couldn't confirm it with a scale.

----------

Another month passed, and the bariatric center reached out to me again.  I went back and forth with the receptionist on the phone about not wanting to put folks there at unnecessary risk and she finally convinced me that things were about as stable as they were likely to be for awhile.  In mid-July, I went back for the first time in four months.

There are few things I've been that excited about in recent years, and certainly nothing since March.

----------

The ride up the elevator to the third floor left me with a moment for a little introspection.  It occurred to me that this was about a year after my weight loss had began as a result of my work there at the Bariatric Center.  Whatever number the scale showed me would be the closest thing I'd see to a sign saying, "You've lost X amount of weight in a year!"  Given that everyone's working estimate had been between a half pound and a pound a week, I was looking at between 26 and 52 pounds total loss.  I already knew that I'd lost 45.  

'That should be plenty, right?' I asked myself as I got off the car.  

The specialists had been adamant that half a pound a week was perfectly good progress.  Anything more than that would have been excellent progress, hence the estimate for a full pound a week at 52 pounds a year.

I'd already lost 45.  That should have been enough.

Yeah.  Right.

----------

The scale said 400.

"I suppose it only makes sense," I said to myself.  "The weather's gotten warmer, which means less time in the mornings for walks because I -hate- the humidity.  Grocery store walks are out too because apparently there's risk of plague."  I chewed the inside of my mouth a little, and was unhappy.

My previous weigh-in in February had been 410.  Half a pound each week for four months would have been around nine pounds.  Excess weight loss should have put me over ten pounds easily.  There should have been a '3' in the hundreds column on that scale.  I was sure of it.

Across from me, my physician was looking at me like I'd grown a second head. 

"What?" I asked blandly.

It was probably a good thing that physical contact was verboten at the moment...

"I...feel somewhat compelled to suggest that maybe you're missing the point.  A lot of points.  All of the points, Stephen."  She shook her head for a moment.  "You..."  She took a breath.  "You have sustained steady weight loss at a rate of more than a pound a week on average for over a year.  You have not broken.  You have not slowed in any appreciable capacity.  You have out-lost even your stretch goal for weight loss by several pounds.  We've been in the middle of the worst world health event of the last ... I don't know how long, and you still lost weight!"

Time slowed, and my primitive male brain began to sense danger.  While I was trying to figure out the wisest course of action though, my mouth opened anyway and said, "Yes.  I won't lie, I would have preferred to see a 3 on that scale."

Big mouth.  Poor impulse control.

"You're missing. The. Point," my physician said slowly.  "People have been wandering in here for the last four months having put on weight.  They're sitting at home eating cookies out of the box instead of even getting out to walk occasionally."

I wasn't sure what to say to that, and for once, my head got to the 'off' switch before my mouth could get to the 'on' switch.

"You'll get there," she said after another moment.  "The next time you come in...you'll get there.  You are right on top of it.  Until then, I'm begging you...you have got to lighten up on yourself!"

----------

It was 2005, I was considerably younger, and someone had let a Bob into my office.

He was a nice enough guy, as Bobs go, but he was still a Bob, and I was damn sure not a people person.

He'd been called in to do what Bobs do, and had been observing everyone in the office for several weeks.  The end of his observations would result in reports being compiled and submitted to our boss.  Those reports would detail our strengths and weaknesses, places where we had room to improve and areas where we excelled.

I'd seen him handing reports in.  Everyone had a manilla folder stuffed to the gills with whatever data he'd managed to compile.  He was either thorough or full of himself.  Possibly both.  Everyone got a copy of their reports so they would know what was coming when the time came to discuss it with the boss.

I was sitting back in my office when my time came.  

Calling it an office was charitable.  It was a large storage closet with a vent and a light fixture.  I'd filled it with tables full of computer equipment and peripherals.  I was the company's IT guy, a one-man band responsible for anything electronic that looked at a one or a zero in a meaningful way.

I'd automated almost everything.  Most of my job consisted of checking the error logs to be sure they were empty, making sure updates and software patches were tested before deployment, and helping the receptionist with the occasional question she might have had.  Everything else was wired for sound, as it were.

I was rather proud of the whole ordeal.

The Bob knocked on the door a few times before he opened it.  He never waited to be admitted.  Under his arm, carried a suspiciously thick envelope.  He closed the door, leaned against it, and watched me for a moment before offering, "I don't know what any of this shit does."

I smiled a little. "Hopefully your report says that's why I'm here."

He shook his head. "The one thing everyone in this office can agree on is why you're here.  And that you're always here.  Any time anything even hints at going wrong, you're here.  People are telling me stories about how they've seen you outside puking your guts out because you've eaten a bit of bad food, but you're still here because some kind of a -" he wiggled one hand at the array of computers behind me. "-thing needed to be done."

He set the envelope down on top of one of the printers I was in the process of maintaining.  "The CEO said you were exempt from my evaluations, you know that?"  He raised an eyebrow for a moment before turning and opening the door.  "You need to blink more, kid."  Then he left, closing the door behind him.

I gave him the requisite ten seconds before I opened the envelope and dumped its contents out into my hand.  Instead of a sheaf of papers, a three by five picture frame fell into my palm.  It contained a photo of a man wearing a Superman costume, passed out on the floor asleep.  A small message was taped to the bottom of the frame.

----------

"What did it say?" my psychologist asked.  I'd concluded my visit with my physician not long after her plea, ending with a promise that I'd be back to see her in a month.

"It said, 'Remember, you are human.'" I replied.  I smiled a little.  "I didn't really understand what he was trying to tell me."  My smile faded and I looked over at my psychologist.  "Also, I'm not sure I recognize myself in a mirror anymore."

If he was shocked by what I said, it didn't register on his face or in his eyes.  He just nodded slowly, radiating the kind of calm, soothing understanding that he always did.  "How long?"

"About six months now.  I started noticing back in February."  I clenched my jaw a little when he shook. his head.  "I won't ask if it bothered you.  I do wish you would have said something to me sooner though."  His smile was somehow both mournful and happy at the same time.  He regretted my discomfort.  Genuinely.

"Why is that?"

"I would have told you that it was normal," he replied.  "That it happens to a lot of people in your position.  That there were things you could do to make yourself more comfortable with it."  He leaned towards me a little, stretching one of his hands out before resting it on the desk in front of him.  "I would have told you that it was okay."  He paused for a moment and then lifted both of his hands a little. "You are okay."

I had to swallow a few times before I managed, "That makes me feel better."

And something unclenched inside of me.

Such is the power a doctor wields.