Uh... Umm. It looks like... ARGGGH!

I've always been OK with names. Not good. But only people that I either rarely saw or saw only in a large group would be tucked back in the memory and not readily where or when I needed it.

Then about the time I turned 50 I started missing a few other nouns. A beautiful picture of the person or item would pop into my brain but the actual name would be missed for a second or two. It was frustrating but then I saw an episode of Oprah about menopause that explained that missing nouns was a common symptom. Knowing that didn't help me remember any better, but at least I had an explanation other than early senility.

But beginning with my huge leap into the MS world my memory now frustrates me regularly.

Now any word at all can be missing in action when I am about to rely on it. Usually in the middle of a conversation. Nouns are the worst of all but at least for them I simply give a description of the item. Remember the old Password game?  Missing verbs are more of a charades game as I demonstrate with fingers, hands and sometimes arms and body.

Adverbs and adjectives are the easiest for me to simply skip but are my most regrettable loss. Google has been a great friend while I'm here on the computer. Open another tab or window, type in the word that is coming to my mind. Which is usually the exact opposite of the word I really want to use. And Google graciously returns words that are close if not the exact word I want. For example, "comforting opposite" lead me to the word regrettable above.

I have learned that in MS land cognitive fog is quite common. Cog fog rears it's head in other ways as well. When I used to wonder where I'd put something I could flash to when I had it last and quickly follow the item it its location. Now I'm more like "You gave it to me?  Really?". Mentally reminding myself to do something would put it on the to-do list that was always there when I needed it. Now those mental reminders are many times remembered - only now my brain seems to have converted it to already having been done.

Time is another victim. 36 years of my marriage seemed to go by like lightening. The episode that brought on my MS diagnosis started just after our anniversary two years ago. These past two years have moved at a snail's pace. Instead of "that seemed like yesterday" has become "it was only two years ago? It seems so much longer".

There is a good part to all of this. All of the days in the past two years seemed to floated to a new strange and almost inaccessible area of my brain. Even the bad ones.