I’m not exactly, or rather not at all the keeper of any knowledge on psychology. But Encephalitis and the impact it has (particularly in memory) does, whether you realise it or not, force you into the consideration of this topic.
Sitting alone, you know that there are things that you can’t remember. You can remember ‘bits of’ yesterday, conversations you had, who you had them with etc. It can take you a moment or two to recall where you watched ‘the game’ last week, what the score was etc. It might come back to you quickly, you knew you were celebrating, you knew it was a big win but you still have to check the scores and this in turn jogs your memory further. You remember knocking over someone’s drink when the first one went in, you might remember that Dave was off for a piss when they got the equaliser. You get the picture.
So you have this ‘history’ in your vision now; some of it real-time, some of it recalled later, some of it recalled after being prompted, some of it being ‘cut and pasted’ from someone else’s memory. From here you can then take this ‘block’ of history forward with you. You can tell it all to someone else next week, bits of it to someone next month. Years from now someone might mention that game and there you go, an instant conversation, ready and waiting.
This in turn provides a bond, a bond that is quite crucial to everyone. So you can see that the memory impairment presents much, much more than a problem with finding the keys.
I caught up with an old, pre-encephalitis work colleague a few weeks ago and quite happily went on five hour drinking session (ok, not the healthiest and doesn’t make me the most popular with my wife but for me anyway, it seems to be periodically unavoidable), discussing who from our old project was now doing what now but when I was asked where i’d just been on holiday. I went into an almost panic mode and ultimately wound just making something up.
Sitting down now, I know that I was in Gozo (which is a rather nice, quiet little island just off Malta) and there are snapshots of things that do come back to me about the holiday.
But although i’ve got these elements, pieces of evidence, I don’t have enough to talk about “the night when we went to this restaurant….I had the….etc.”
So, ultimately you haven’t been able to form these blocks that you’ll in turn ‘pull out’ when you bump into someone, or meet up with a group of the lads for a pint. These ‘blocks’, combined with current affairs that we collect such as political events, football scores and things like that, make up the elements that allow us to instigate conversations with others and join in conversations that other groups may be having.
It’s at points like these that we can realise the full impact that the cerebral damage has made. It goes far beyond just epilepsy and forgetting where you put the keys.
Just going back to the football scores example for a moment. One of the greatest revelations from when I was first in hospital was when I was presented with a newspaper showing teams within each of the scottish football divisions. In October 2012, Rangers Football club went into administration and as a consequence of this they were relegated to the lowest division in Scottish football.
As a Celtic supporter I would normally have been jumping up and down and having a good laugh about this but suddenly shocked me into the reality of what had happened. Yes I'd forgotten that my father had passed away, even forgotten my daughter existed but for some reason these were things that could’ve just been shaken out of me and they’d return over time. This though, to me anyway, represented something different. Difficult to explain, but this didn’t feel like it’d been forgotten. It was something that had never, ever, been there and it was easy to look back at the exact dates when this event took place and in turn identify the period of time that had completely vanished, never to come back.