Happy birthday, Ignoble Bard: Thranduil Goes to Hell

[randy_o]

New birthday story for Ignoble Bard, written in the Jael!verse and borrowing certain elements from the Pande!verse with her gracious permission.

Thranduil Goes To Hell

Comments

[randy_o]

I have to feel a certain kind of joy to write, and joy was in very short supply. Also, it is a clinical phenomenon that caring for a person with dementia day to day will reduce the caregiver's cognitive abilities by half. It is largely the stress of having one brain to function for two people, one of whom has little memory, is often unreasonable by normal human standards, hence very uncooperative, and attempting to communicate with a person who is ostensibly speaking English but the words and phrases mean entirely something else. It can also take a few years off potential longevity. I would explain to my mother that I was her mentat, her external hard drive and she didn't have to worry about losing her important memories because they were safe in my head. The same with organizing her life, her health needs, and her finances. I was still capable of ,ogical thought at my previous level, but my short term memory began to be shot to shit. I'm still not completely back. I still grope for words that I damn well know I know, and I made several mistskes in my post above. It was Abraham Ford who died in the fall 2016 Walking Dead season premiere, resolving the previous season cliffhanger of who the villain executed eith a baseball bat. And I was wrong about the year my mother died. I'm pretty sure it was early 2018, but I'm not certain. That is very unlike the old me.

I took a health and genetics test with 23andMe which told me I do not have the gene associated with later onset Alzheimers, which makes a lot of sense with the family history of two maternal great-aunts who developed dementia in their 80s and one who was sharp as a tack until her death at 97. Otherwise I would be panicking every time a word or fact eludes me. I remember what you wrote some time ago about a neurologist in-law telling you that we all decline with age, but the higher-functioning you start the higher-functioning you are at the end.

We'll have to see if I'm as good in 2019 as I was back in 2016.