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It has been a little over a year since my diagnosis and so very much has changed. In that time, I lost three of my closest friends, gave up a job that I loved, my only son and sweet daughter-in-love moved seven hours away, and I set about coming to grips with a disease that many feel is a worse fate than death. It was a year that has often brought me to my knees. While I certainly won’t miss 2025, I am grateful for the good things God brought: Renewed and new friendships, hope in a treatment option, and God’s grace of time. 

Now what I really want know about last year is where did all the words go? 😂 

Words. I have certainly taken them for granted my whole life. I’ve always been a super speller (Thanks, Dad!), never hesitated to speak in front of people, and was pretty adept at carrying on normal conversations. Now I’m not only having to look up how to spell words, I have to glance back-and-forth just to transfer each letter to paper. Sometimes when I’m asking a question, there are no words to pull out for the answer. I don’t mean I don’t know the answer, there’s nothing there. Zip. Zero. No words. Just a weird kind of nothingness like groping for a door in a blacked out room. Yesterday I was telling my mom that Covi (my Shorkie) ate a hotdog And she responded “the whole thing?” (Meaning meat and bun). I said, “No, just the (insert cricket sound here).” I was left to describe the middle meat part of a hotdog (the weiner) . Even when she supplied the word, all I could do was nod because really the word did not register with me. I find myself nodding a lot these days because it seems to help others feel less uncomfortable. Lastly, I recently wrote out something I wanted to share with my bible study group. I wrote it out because I knew I would forget what I wanted to say by the next day. I also didn’t want to be too wordy when I expressed the thought. What I wasn’t prepared for was the moment of sheer panic when it came time to read it aloud. So much panic that I found myself at the brink of tears. I was confident in what I wanted to read. I wasn’t worried about forgetting the words from the paper. But in that split second, I realized my brain might not be able to verbalize the words in front of me. What madness is this!?

I’ve learned enough about this disease to know that this is a part of normal progression for some patients . But reading about it or hearing someone explain how the brain can change in this way did not quite prepare me for the actual “happening”. Part of me wants to continue believing that the words are there and I just need to find the door in the dark. The reality is they may be gone and I have to adapt. However, I’m pretty hardheaded so for a while, with the ever amazing patience of my friends and family, I will keep looking for the door where 2025 hid the words.

P.S. Someone told me recently I should add a few photos to the blog to help them. Get to know me better. I’m not very tech savvy so I hope these don’t turn out gigantic!

I was also told to add an easy to find Buy Now button for my book on here. Still working on that!

Thanks for reading, Teresa #NoOneFightsAlone #StopTheStigma