Memory issues and speech!

For a while after my adrenals were removed, I seemed to have the memory issues improve. I still deal with this symptom all the time. That's why I'm always running late on this blog! Hehehe! I always forget! My brain seems to function best late at night.

They have proved that Cushing's causes the brain to shrink, in the part that deals with our memory. My long term memory is good, but short term is a joke! Sometimes I ask my kids the same question over and over. I don't do that all the time. Sometimes it's just worse than others.

When my Cushing's started getting really bad in 2006, this was one of the most alarming symptoms to me. Especially since my dad had just died with Alzheimer's the previous year! My grandmother (his mom) had it too. I started forgetting what I was talking about mid sentence while taking with someone. Talk about embarrassing! More than it being embarrassing, it was downright scary! I thought I must have early onset Alzheimer's!

Another symptom I had with Cushing's was saying words wrong. I actually thought this was funny most of the time. We always made a joke of it. Once in a while it would just make me mad that I couldn't talk right, but mostly, it was just funny! Somehow, the brain will mess up and make you say something you didn't intend to say. Most often, I would instantly combine words and create a new one. Like one time I called a handicapped ramp a "slamp". That was a combination of slope and ramp. I once told one of the kids to "mair" up the socks. That was a combination of match and pair. Those are some examples. At other times, I just had odd "words" that were not really words at all... not a combination of anything, and who knows why it came out that way. I can't even remember what I called our RV one time. I heard the word come out of my mouth and was puzzled. I meant to say either camper or RV (I don't remember now), but it was some odd combination of letters! I was in shock. Those were particularly alarming to me. I can make sense of combining words, but this other deal was just bizarre! I was once reading to one of the kids, and I read the word "newspaper" as "recorner". I had no idea where that came from! I was looking at newspaper, and meant to say newspaper, but "recorner" came out of my mouth!

Besides those problems, we also often have a hard time thinking of the word we want to use, or we have trouble spelling words we've known all our life. They suddenly don't look right when typed out. We often have to sit and think of another word that means the same thing, because we can't think of the one we want to use, or can't remember how to spell it.

Thankfully, I don't have a lot of problems with this now. I will occasionally have something odd pop up. Mostly I still deal with memory issues. That is still frustrating and embarrassing!

It's hard to say what "one" symptom is the hardest, or worst to have with Cushing's. Aside from the physical changes, the brain changes are often one of our hardest things to deal with. Many of us were very smart before Cushing's. We had high positions in jobs, or high IQ's. Cushing's often makes us feel like we are losing our mind, or that we are now "dumb". We aren't dumb, and we are still very smart, but everything is more challenging for us with Cushing's. Cortisol literally affects everything in our body. It spares nothing!