Brain Surgery September 4th

Started writing a reply to your email yesterday afternoon.  It turns out that I write “like a nut,” doing lengthy documents that are barely connected to the idea and carry crazy implications.  What I write in the afternoon tends to be worse that what I can write in the morning.

I can do it better by keeping it brief.  I had to have brain surgery September 4th due to microbial infection of my brain.  My surgery has worked out well (by the doctors standards, seems terrible to me).  We saw my doctor yesterday for a quick check on his part.  I didn’t know exactly who he was, (typical symptom of brain surgery), until he told me.  I thought he was a potential member of his staff.  I was surprised that the actual surgeon wanted to check with me.

Your complaints about visiting nurses and various types of therapy weakly matches my experience.  My visitors did speak English and were understandable.  Had one or two good visits, but the majority were poorly prepared nurses.  A couple of them were so bad that Amanda called the medical clinic and reported that we did not want to see xxx, yyy, ever again.

It sounds to me that you live in a wonderful place.  Evidently more summer oriented than annually functional.  I am sure that you a leading the trend and will see great progress in the next few years.

We moved to NH, the state where I grew up. My sister Jane, my brother Harry live close enough to drive over for dinner.  We picked a place to live that is close to the airport, a hospital, and has a nice view of the Merrimack river.  Amanda did several months of research via the internet before we left Maryland to physically inspect this place.  We rented for two years just incase we found something that we liked better. We didn’t.

Recently, a few days ago, I realized that fitness and health do not ensure freedom from disease or a long life.  This generated an early morning sense of urgency to do only what I really want to do and not waste any of my time watching or reading fiction.  (Perhaps this is what happened to me, or I have invented a fake explanation of who I am.)

I have been rereading a Kindle book on philosophy by Mortimer J. Adler.  The reason I know that I am rereading it is that it has notes that I left so long ago that I am a completely different thinker than I was 15 years ago, (Kindle hit the market in 2007.)  I read the book now and I have to read many pages and paragraphs at least three times to understand what Adler is writing.  I felt that this rereading was a symptom of my brain surgery, i.e. stupidity.  Then I found a note, by me years ago, in the book that cited exactly the same information about rereading pages three times.  I believed the repeated reading was related to the complexity of the document.  So I now confuse normal rereading as being a symptom of my stupidity.  I am confusing intelligence with stupidity.

Amanda has confronted me many times for blaming my thoughts and actions on my brain surgery.  She assures me that I am acting effectively and normally. I should stop complaining about the quality of my thoughts and actions.

My lesson is that just because my sense of thinking and feeling is different doesn’t mean that it is worse than it used to be.  It is only different, not worse (i.e. crazier).