Death of Personality

If anyone works with me and thinks I've been acting a bit odd lately- well, you're not alone. I think I've been acting odd lately. Last night I think it finally hit me why, and turned me into a complete space case for a good hour and a half. My managers, oddly enough, didn't seem too bothered; I guess they're so used to me being overly perky that the sight of me being overly... un-perky (that's a word now) was, well, startling but not far-fetched. Now here I am, it's six-thirty in the morning and I only went to bed around one, I am definitely going to try and get back to sleep but first I need to type this.

(I'm in Wordpad right now, so I can check myself several times before I hit "post". I don't want to turn into one of those "pain is joy" type bloggers; I just think I'm sort of justified at the moment.)

My uncle has a brain fungus. Seriously. I thought my mother was pulling my leg when she first told me; there is an old family joke about the "terrible dreaded creeping corroded fogus mungus fungus (among us)". The thing is, there apparently really is a creeping corroded fungus among us; there are a lot of them, actually. We breathe them in all the time, and the vast majority of us will never even be aware of it, let alone be affected by it. Unfortunately, my uncle is diabetic and was unaware of it at the time; diabetes suppresses your immune system, and his body was unable to fight off the spores and contracted one of the worst fungi you can get, mucormycosis. (Warning: not a pleasant article to read.) By the time they got it, the stuff had spread up his right nostril into his entire right eye structure, a good deal of the right side of his brain, and was threatening his cerebellum and brain stem.

Now, anyone who knows my uncle knows that he's... well, he's a lot like me. Probably the most like me of anyone in the family in many regards: he's goofy and fun-loving, hangs out between chaotic good and chaotic neutral on the alignment spectrum, and is the most stubborn bastard out there when he has to be. (He's been compared to comedian Lewis Black several times; he even looks like him.) And what does a stubborn bastard-type do when they get a disease with (I'm not kidding, read the article) a 30-90% mortality rate? Survive, of course.

It's taken a lot. They had to take out his entire eye structure- the right eye and its optic nerve, the orbit (that's the technical term for the skull's eye socket, more or less), and gobs of surrounding tissue. A good deal of the right frontal lobe had to be taken out too. They've got him in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, and they're giving him this $1,000-a-bag Drug From Hell that will hopefully clear out the last of the spores but could very well destroy his kidneys in the process- and he's got the diabetes that started the problem on top of everything else.

You might be going "Well, hey, he's alive, right? That's the important thing." And I suppose you're more or less right.... but read that last paragraph again. Right frontal lobe... taken out. Just reading that makes me want to vomit. From what my father told me, the specific areas taken out are centers for memory and personality; I've been researching a little myself, and it seems that the area surrounding the orbit is related to decision-making and long-term planning and drive. Higher-functioning, makes-us-human good stuff. And they pulled it out. Specifics aside, I asked my father if Uncle Cleve was still... Uncle Cleve, and he said "no."

My uncle has been lobotomized. Maybe not literally; maybe I shouldn't even be calling it, it's the wrong medical term or something- but that's what it sounds like to me. For a person like me, with my brain as the only thing going for me (and even that called into question on a daily basis), I think that just might be the ultimate nightmare right there. And what am I supposed to do, rail against the doctors that just saved his life? Au contraire, I am eternally grateful to them for their willingness to do anything to save him. But it's still real hard. This comes right after my grandmother's fairly recent diagnosis of Alzheimer's, too; that one scares me too, since it seems to run in the family. So does diabetes, it turns out. Between one thing and another, how long until it's my turn for a death of personality?

A frequent theme in science fiction is the "death of personality"; for example, on the '90's show Babylon Five it was used as a capital punishment. A telepath wipes out your old personality, and then establishes a new one for you and turns you into a productive member of society. It seems like a good idea at first- keeps both the liberals and conservatives happy. Now, though, I feel like my family is being punished by death of personality- and they didn't do anything. That horrible little voice in the back of my head sometimes thinks that it would be a lot easier to lose my loved ones if they just died like normal folk; I keep punching her down, but she pops up again. I can't help it; I'm only human. And then there is the great eternal whatever-you-wanna-call-it, hope. Uncle Cleve still has a lot of recovery to do; maybe he'll turn out alright. Some people walk away from frontal lobe damage with nothing more than OCD or schizophrenia (neither of which are as bad as Hollywood makes them out to be, and both highly treatable). Others obviously don't; anyone who's read or seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest knows that. I don't know for sure; if anything really bad happens, then Mom says she'll get me out to Denver somehow, but otherwise I'm going by my parent's communications.

I've mostly been stressed out about this at work; I couldn't for the life of me figure out why work was suddenly so stressful, and then it hit me last night. My parent's house in Denver is right down the road from a Target; I've always associated the two, though it was mostly subconscious before now. Believe it or not, the fact that I work there has little to do with anything at all- it simply means that I spend a lot of time there (Captain Obvious, sorry) and triggers that connection. This has been going on for a few months now, during which I feel I haven't quite been myself in the workplace- I do believe the two are connected, if in a rather bizarre way. This has led to a few other thoughts about my life in general, but I'll save them for some other time; this is starting to get long. If you're reading this, thanks for letting me vent or rant or confide or whatever you want to call it. If nobody reads this, at least writing it made me feel a little.... better? I don't know. I'm a human, and we're a confusing bunch.