Learning To Live With Lowered Expectations

Because I’m very sensitive to medication, I’ve resigned myself to knowing that if there’s a weird side effect that can happen from a drug, I’ll probably have it. In the past, I’ve had side effects that ranged from allergic rashes, increased thirst, and nasty tastes in my mouth for an hour after taking each pill, to a very strange urinary tract infection and fever that lasted exactly one day until the medicine had gone out of my system.

Recently, though, I’ve started taking a new drug which has a side effect I hadn’t previously experienced. This medicine makes me stupid.

While I have many faults, most of which are retained and updated daily in my mind, being stupid has never been one of them. I used to have no problems understanding Chris, for example, unless he was mumbling into his shirt and I couldn’t hear him.

Lately, though, I can hear every single word that he’s saying and still not be able to comprehend the overall meaning of his sentence. And it’s not like we spend our time together discussing graduate-school levels of calculus or physics, although how cool would it be if we did that? We would be the life of every college party! “Hey, check it out, Jane and Chris are talking about quantum physics again!” “No way, so soon? I’m going to forget about getting that drink and run over to gaze admiringly at them!”

When I say “college party,” I mean, of course, a college made up of people like me who lack social skills and share an embarrassing lack of propriety. I am, after all, the person who greeted the news of a friend’s second pregnancy by blurting out, “Was this planned?”

I first began to realize that my intelligence was being affected when I watched Entourage and didn’t understand what was going on. The show, if you don’t know it, is about a fictional actor and his fictional buddies, loosely based on the exploits of actor/rapper/third nipple guy Marky Mark. Real actors often pop up on the show playing themselves. For example, in the season we were watching, Melinda Clarke (possibly the only reason to watch The O.C.) played an actress named Melinda Clarke who was married to a guy named Terrance who was played by Malcolm McDowell.

Due to the medication, my mind was not able to grasp this mingling of fiction and non-fiction. Was Melinda Clarke really married to Malcolm McDowell? Or was she married to a guy named Terrance who was a real person who happened to be portrayed by Malcolm McDowell?

In the end, I had to imdb the real actors to see who they were married to, before I understood they were playing a fictional version of themselves who were married to other fictional people. It seems simple now, but the truth is that I spent probably three hours pondering this, which is about two hours and 59 minutes more than the topic deserves.

If that weren’t bad enough, my memory began to disappear. I accompanied my father to Home Depot a few days ago, and when we walked out of the store, neither of us had any clue at all as to where he had parked his car. Since Chris wasn’t with us, my father and I had to wander around the vast parking lot until we eventually stumbled upon his car competely by accident.

My father is nearly 70. I am 33. Shouldn’t my memory be at least slightly better than his?

New horrors arrived daily. Writing, it turns out, takes three times longer than usual when you have to stop every so often to call your husband and have discussions like:

“Hey, Chris, what’s that word that means, like, surprise, but kind of with revulsion? Like revolted surprise?”

“Like astonishment?”

“No, a different word, it’s like surprise, but not surprise, and it’s like, looking down on someone at the same time…Starts with an ‘O’, I think.”

Except the words never do start with the letter I remember. In fact, the word I was thinking of in the above example, which only came to me just as I was writing this sentence, is disdain. If you look closely, you’ll see that “disdain” does not start with an O.

I wouldn’t mind the memory loss so much if only it were applied evenly — I mean, if I can’t remember that there are things I’m forgetting, and I can’t remember how I used to be able to watch the CW without an interpreter, then this side effect would be much easier to handle. As it is, my memory loss strikes only in rare moments, leaving only the useless bits of information intact.

Two nights ago, for example, I suddenly woke up and remembered a kind of rhyme we used to say as kids. It began:

Hello operator,
Please give me number nine!
And if you disconnect me, I will chop off your
Behind the fridgerator, there lay a piece of glass!
Miss Lucy sat upon it, and she broke her big fat
Ask me no more questions
Please tell me no more lies!

and I can’t remember the rest. However, what possible reason is there to retain even the little that I did? Will someone accost me one day as I’m walking down the street and say, “Quick! Finish this verse, and I’ll give you a million dollars! ‘Hello operator, please give me…’”

I wish. Because until then, I can’t see much of a benefit to these side effects. Here I am, with my average intelligence, below average memory, and really crooked bangs. Thank god I’m not still single.

Posted by: Supersonic Jane | December 22, 2006 | 11:46 pm
Posted in: This Life