I have been chatting in this personal blog about some recent discoveries about my health. If you are reading this then you probably know me, I don’t advertise or promote this blog but writing in it helps me to sort my personal priorities.
It is too easy to take good health for granted – until something goes wrong.
There is so much information about diet, exercise, life-style, stress and general health that it is easy to get overloaded with the information and do nothing. Many people are getting fatter, life seems full of events causing stress and anxiety with financial meltdowns and political stupidities.
For several years have had health problems, mostly heart problems. I had a series of operations six years ago and was very grateful for getting through them with the help of the fantastic health services in France. But it seems the cause of these problems was also creating damage to my brain which I was not aware of.
A few weeks ago I was typing at this computer, I lost balance and fell off my chair – yes I had a few glasses of wine, but no more than usual for the evening, perhaps three glasses, or truthfully perhaps four or five – anyway, I could not get up off the floor, could not walk and could not coordinate my hands or feet, by now I was stone cold sober and scared.
Being in France I was able to get a MRI scan very quickly, the results are given to you within 20 minutes and a consultant appointment fixed in a few days.
The scan showed a lot of damage to my brain, done over a period of many years, but the damage had accumulated leaving a lot of “empty” areas, the recent “stroke” had tipped the balance to a very noticeable effect.
Now I was really worried, this explained a lot, my lack of concentration, inability to work on many of the Internet and marketing projects I would normally have done very quickly, difficulty in walking, rudeness and lack of consideration to others and other daft things. Basically I have been having a long series of mini-strokes, plus a couple of larger ones and these had permanently damaged my brain.
High blood pressure was probably the culprit – so medication to help this and a strict diet are immediately in place (yes I am fat) – I have also been developing intolerances to many foods over the last couple of months so now all alcohol, milk products, wheat products and sugars are totally off-limits. I’m especially careful to avoid any processed foods or any food with fructose in it as this seems to be as bad as, or possible worse than, alcohol and seems proven to be a major cause of obesity.
So what effect will the damage to my brain have? Some things can be assessed – intelligence, IQ, “tests” can indicate something (it depends on the definition of intelligence). The last tests I took were over 30 years ago when I was working on some research into psychometrics. These indicated an IQ for me around 152 to 162 (depending on the test structure) – other tests for motivation and stuff put me in some interesting categories. But without doubt my IQ is now very different (ummm, much lower) 
I am using some techniques to evaluate if I can retrain my brain and compensate, using other parts to replace those no longer active – in the last few days I have been able to improve reaction times and memory. Deductive reasoning etc seems much harder to improve, there is no doubt this will take time – a long time perhaps.
However, I see this as an opportunity. For most of my life I have found most things very easy, but at the same time I have been intolerant of the “stupidity” or “inability” of the mistakes of others – clearly not a very intelligent attitude. But now that I am finding it difficult to quickly “see” the answers to everything, I must think, consider, use experience and ask for the help of others to achieve my objectives. There are still many things I wish to accomplish and I must rationalise what is really possible – I hope to focus again on photography, with less buzzing around in my head I seem to be “seeing” and visualising with a much stronger “feeling”, I still have the technical skills.
Learning the problem is the first step.