Topa-Haze All 'Round My Brain

I am an unusual engineer in many respects.  And not just because I'm a goddess.  My earliest ambition in life was to be a writer and indeed, by age 11, I had produced a "novel" entitled Visitors From Earth in which the heroine - named after the most popular girl in my class, but really me - manages to avert interplanetary warfare, discovers she is the princess of a distant planet, and acquires two boyfriends, but refuses, for the time-being, to marry either of them, unlike her two friends who settle right in to marriage at story's end.  All in 6 pages.  I have not yet averted interplanetary warfare, but I have indeed discovered my goddess- and empress-hood, not to mention the avenging angel sideline, which I think is just as good as princess of a distant planet.  And I'm on my second husband.  Hmmm...

Anyway, words have always been my friends.  Even before I could read, I loved to talk.  One of my early nicknames was Flibbertigibbet, which an aunt coined to somehow describe my nonstop verbal stream.  My nose was in a book from the day I learned to read.  Literally - I read on the school bus, walking down the hallway between classes, walking home from school.  I hid novels in my school textbooks so I could read during class, because class was never fast enough to keep my attention.  It was no problem to read and follow the teacher at the same time.  I kept a daily diary from age 9 or so through the end of high school.  I wrote (bad) poems, I tried to write novels, and I read anything that was printed in movable type, as the saying used to go. 

And then I went to college and I became an...engineer?   

Well, I was really good at math, too.  And coal miner's daughters have to be practical. 

You know when you write those cover letters for jobs and yak about your excellent written, verbal, and interpersonal communication skills?  No problem - I knew it was true!  And then when I interviewed they could quickly see I wasn't lying.  Words R Me.  

And then, one day in 2003, I had a stroke.  You know that old joke about PhD - it really stands for "permanent head damage"?  Yeah!  I've got some!  As a grad student, I worked on gadolinium contrast agents for magnetic resonance imaging.  As a stroke patient, I had them injected into me and got to look at the pretty MRI/MRA pictures.  The MRI techs loved me - they'd start to ask if I was claustrophobic and warn me about the noise and I'd cut them off - yeah, yeah, I used to volunteer for my friend who was developing new pulse sequences and I was in the magnet for up to 4 hours at a time.  I just go in there and go to sleep.  I am the perfect patient. 

Sooooo...the stroke left me with a blind spot in my vision, and chronic migraines.  Not good, although I am aware it could have been a lot worse.  Which I do not need anyone else to tell me.  (Topic for another day.) 

To try and prevent these migraines, I have been working my way through the pharmacy.  (Note to readers:  please, please, please do not write and tell me about your sister's best friend's uncle's surefire migraine cure.  Please.)  One of the drugs I take now is called Topamax.  It actually seems to have some benefit for me.  But there is a tradeoff.  It's called "side effects".  Hah.

When I first started taking Topamax, my toes tingled all the time - sort of the pins and needles feeling like when they've "fallen asleep".  I was warned about that.  But it went away after a few weeks.  I was also warned that I might experience difficulty on occasion with names or nouns when speaking.  What's that about, I wondered. 

Here's what it's about:

When I am speaking, and I am about to say someone's name, or the name of an object, just as the word is about to come out of my mouth, it vanishes.  It vanishes in a particular way.  It feels almost as if it has been "choked" out of me.  As if the word had been in my throat, about to come out, but I physically choked on the word - it's lodged in my throat somewhere.  It left my brain already, and can't be retrieved.  It got broken to bits in my throat, and can't be interpreted by my speech apparatus.

I know what you are about to say. "Oh, that happens to me all the time, too."  No, it does not.  I know what it is like to forget or be unable to recall a name or word you were trying to think of, for ordinary people.  That still happens to me, too, and it is completely unlike this.  This Topa-choke is accompanied by a physical sensation that is really almost like someone briefly choked me as I was about to speak.  My husband has gotten good at swiftly filling in the word for me now when this happens.  Yay, Mr. Zuska! 

I was able to grudgingly live with this, even though it meant Miss Flibbertigibbit had become Miss Flib---

I was willing to live with this awkward and halting speech style that left me feeling stupid, if my migraines would be less frequent.  But then the Topa-haze started creeping into my writing.  It began last summer when I was taking another similar drug at the same time, Lamictal.  Suddenly, I could no longer spell.  I mean, I couldn't spell simple words, like "health".  First it was typing them out and looking at them on the screen and not being sure if they were spelled correctly.  Thank you, MS Word spell checker, for helping my sanity here.  Then, it got to where I couldn't finish typing the word I wanted to write.  I would start out "he--" and then not know what to do next.  How is health spelled?  How can I write it down?  The way I spell words is I see them in my mind, and then I write down what I see.  But now I couldn't see health.  I had no idea what that word looked like.  I couldn't tell you what letter came after "e" to save my soul. 

So I got off Lamictal and I reduced the Topamax.  This took about 5 months.  But now the headaches were worse.  The other treatment I was trying wasn't sufficient on its own.  That's why I'm in the process of increasing Topamax again now.

And that's why, yesterday, in a little piece I wrote, I gave my email address incorrectly.

When I went to write my email address, I hesitated.  I couldn't think of it.  Then I started to write.  I looked at what I wrote.  It seemed wrong.  But I couldn't think of how it should be different.  I finally concluded it must be right, and left it as it was.  About 7 hours later - I was almost asleep, actually - suddenly I realized that it was wrong, and knew what the correct address should be.

My first reaction was to feel mortified. Mistakes like this are NOT the kind of thing that Zuska does.  I was a medical writer once, and medical writers are notorious for annoyingly picky attention to minute detail.  I had a mental image of my entire blog as a smooth surface, with this error protruding like an ugly scab.  (Zuska is, um, something of a perfectionist as well.)  I imagined the world was about to end. 

Then I told myself, shut up, go to sleep, and blog about it tomorrow. 

Why write all this?  Why not just correct it and leave it at that?  I think it's worth sharing my personal Topa-haze story for a few reasons. 

• Even if no one ever reads this, I feel better.  Therefore - already worth it.
• I am pretty sure I am not the only woman in the world dealing with disability.  Maybe knowing about my Topa-haze will make you feel a little less lonely.
• I think this whole incident is illustrative of something women are prone to suffer from:  very keen eyesight when it comes to our errors, near total blindness when it comes to our excellence.  Not unlike the blind spot in my vision. 

If you think that you might have a blind spot like that - oh come on, it's almost certain that you do - you should try what I do.  Periodically I move my head a little to the right and up, to see if there is something important in my blind spot that I missed.  This morning I had to move my head a lot - had to rescan entries from the last several days, and even think briefly about my resume. 

Topa-haze:  No match for Zuska.  An impaired Zuska is still capable of averting interplanetary warfare, should the need arise.  

Now go back to your office or lab, review your work, looking ONLY for good things, and repeat after me:  "I am the princess of the planet Zorn."      

© Copyright 2006 Suzanne E. Franks. Last update: 5/18/2006; 1:27:53 PM.