Remember

Yesterday morning, my students asked me reasons for the way certain diseases behave. "This is the way it is," I answered. "All that is ever asked of you is that you have to remember it."

This is my mantra – one I seldom follow.

Despite my teaching others to memorize this and that, I have to admit that my own memory is in decline. There is no question that creativity declines throughout all those years in the medical school. Hey, decline in creativity after rote learning is natural; what else do you expect? Most of us take it for granted, akin to the way a man thinks about the growth of the belly circumference – it simply grows with our age.

But - and this is the point - when it comes to the decline in our memory, we feel like an old man regretting and bemoaning his receding hairline. My brow furrowed and the crow’s feet deepened as I struggled to keep myself from forgetting things. Alas, I went to the post office yesterday and picked up my registered mail, and simply forgot to collect the stamps. Uh-oh. Whenever I quoted something like "a recent study published last month in the New England Journal of Medicine" during the rounds, it would turn out that the paper appeared in the Journal few years ago. As the months and years went by, I realized that I am the victim of dementia. And what makes it worse – it's the sort of disease for which there's no cure! Out loud I say, "I can't even remember when was the last time I remembered correctly."