Are Diabetics Forgetful? Setting the Record Straight #13

Deborah E
00:02:25

Hello, everyone, and welcome to DiabeticReal, and I'm your host, Deborah E All right, this week we are going to talk about memory as it relates to diabetics. And I feel like this is something I can talk about.

I'm not exactly young. I wasn't born yesterday. So I'm in the age group where memory is a concern.

So since I've had diabetes for several decades, I think I'm at a point where I can comment on how memory affects or doesn't affect me as a diabetic. And that is the topic of today's episode. So let's dive in, shall we?

This actually came to mind because a few months ago, someone very dear to me, and I won't name who it is, but it was someone very dear to me sat me down and I will say his presentation. And no, it wasn't my husband. I will at least disclose that one. My husband is like the biggest cheerleader.

I mean, he's right there and he sees firsthand, you know what I'm talking about. And you'll hear me mention him throughout this. So if I ever say Michael, that's my hubby.

Anyway, someone very dear to me sat me down and said, you know, Deb, I need to tell you something, and I don't want to be hurtful, but it's just something that I think you need to hear and I should probably tell you. So I do want to get 100%, you know, five out of five stars credit that the presentation was very loving and how he told me about it.

But I have to say I don't agree 100% with the content of what he shared with me. I actually know the source of where he got the information.

And it's not that he is incapable of researching it himself, but he trusted the source, who I believe to be the source, shall I say, Because I don't want to be accusatory. I believe it was a person who is an expert, so to speak. And again, this podcast is not to go bash doctors or medical people.

All it is, is to get those of us who have diabetes especially, but those of us who have any kind of challenge in life, whatever it is, to look at it reasonably and consider options, and especially to listen to our bodies and to be balanced. So doctors out there, nurses out there, I am not out there bashing you. I think you have valid concerns. I see so many diabetics.

So many people come to me and say, I have been attack by my doctor.

I have been attacked by the medical community, and they Just don't understand what I'm going through or even listen to anything I have to share about my experience. That's why diabetic real exists, is to help people to understand that we do have something valid because we're basically the lab rat there.

We're studying ourselves, we're studying, you do this, this happens. You do this, this happens. So, please, people listen to us. So, anyway, back on track.

I know that this loving person that sat down with me had gotten the information, or I believed that he had gotten the information from somebody in the medical field, and so he thought it was valid information. I can't blame him for that. Hey, that makes sense, right?

Anyway, he sat me down and he said, deb, it's something you need to realize that in diabetics their memory goes. And memory cannot be trusted. I looked at it. I almost laughed. I almost laughed.

Okay, the thing is, any of us, diabetic or not, could have memory issues. And the memory issues could be blamed on something else, another diagnosis. It could be blamed on genetics. It could be blamed on the aging process.

It could be blamed on several things. And my belief is that it should not immediately go to the diabetes just because somebody has type 1 diabetes or diabetic.

The other thing too is this person that brought this up had not been chatting with me daily or living near me. I hadn't seen him in 20 years. So what I remember or don't remember, that's not something he would be privy to.

So in order to assess me in my memory, you kind of have to have some interactions with me as far as what I remember. And he wasn't really at that point where he had the data to be able to assess what I remember. I don't remember.

That was kind of why I almost wanted to chuckle, because it was like, what is it that we discussed that you're able to lay it on the table and say, hey, honey, you don't remember this? Where was the discussion on which we had the basis? Or is that what it is that I'm not remembering somehow? You know, let's have some proof here.

Let's have a discussion where we're actually proving that I don't have memory. It seemed like he just.

But again, I'm going to give him credit because the key thing was he wanted to simply let me know that this was something he believed to be true because he believed the source that told him was a credible source. So I'm giving him points for that one. He really was trying to be loving and tell me In a very loving way.

So, and let's jump ahead, because the same person, it was really kind of funny because the next day we were just sitting around having conversation and I was remembering a story from back when I was, oh, I was about five, six, I was, you know, in elementary school, and I mentioned a name to him and I'm going to use a different name. So anyone that happens to know the name and you say, well, wait a minute, her memory is bad because that's not the name.

I'm intentionally using a different name because it would not be polite for me to actually say the real name here on this broadcast. So I'm intentionally using a different name and I'm using an odd name because the actual name was kind of odd.

So I'm using one that's sort of reminiscent of that just to give it a parallel, but it's not the real name. But to give you an idea of just how unique this name was, it's not like John Smith or like my name, Anderson. It wasn't that easy.

It was a very odd, unusual name. So anyway, I'm telling the story and how I remember this. And I said, oh, yeah? And hey, this person, I'll just say Leonard Ficklestein. And he.

His eyes got wide, his jaw dropped. He looked at me and he said, you remember that from when you were just a little girl? I said, yeah, I do. He was blown away.

He just said that I have memory problems as a type 1 diabetic. And here I am recalling something from, I have to say, over four decades ago in great detail. And I pegged it as far as the name.

He's like, there's no way you could remember that. Yeah, I actually do remember that. I remember the event and I remember the name. And he's like, that is the name.

Yeah, because I don't have a memory issue. So I think he's rethinking where he got this information. As I said, there was no data to support the argument.

I hate to use the word argument, but the argument that I was having memory issues, he was just simply relaying something he'd heard from someone he trusted as an expert, and he thought that he should be loving and tell me this information. So anyway, moving on in talking about memory.

And this is reminiscent of a couple episodes ago where I mentioned about complications of diabetes and how it's so easy for people to say, oh, you stubbed your toe, the pain you have, that's because of diabetes. And is there some truth to it?

Yeah, you could stub Your toe and the pain that you have or the pain that you don't have has to do with blood flow or lack of blood flow to your toe. Yeah.

I'm not saying that there's no truth to that, but let's be careful in dealing with type one diabetics that we're not blaming everything, as I used in the other episode where I said, hey, a breakup with a boyfriend or something. Oh, that's difficult because you're a type 1 diabetic. Let's not go blaming 100% of the events that happen in a type 1 diabetics life on the diabetes.

And believe me, I have experienced that with some people where absolutely everything in my life, they say, oh, that's because you're diabetic. Oh, that's because you're diabetic. It's like I have a. I don't want to get graphic here, guys. You know, plug your ears if you don't want to hear this.

But it's like a yeast infection. Oh, that's because you had. Had high blood sugars. No, Let me show you my log. Not a single high blood sugar. So quit the blame game. Quit the blame game.

At least. At the least, let's ask questions before the blame game.

Even with blaming and telling diabetics that they have memory issues before even talking to them about whether or not they're having any memory issues. So a couple other things come to mind, and this one I've got to give my husband credit for. He was saying how, you know, a lack of memory.

Sometimes there are cases where there's a complete blank spot, like there is no recall on something that happened. That is, you're just not remembering that something happened. That's a blank page versus recalling something with erroneous details. And that was.

This person that was talking to me was talking about erroneous details that doesn't generally happen, and I haven't had that happen. Now, how can I say that?

Well, there's a couple things that I started working on decades ago just because I was concerned about memory problems in general. And maybe I'm a little anal retentive on the side of details that could be. But I started writing things down, basically a journal.

So things that would happen, I would make note of it and write it down. The other thing that I did is I would tell my husband about things.

So it might have been something that happened three years before I met my husband, but I had it written down in a journal and I also told him about it. So later on, when I'm being told, hey, this didn't happen. I go back to my journal. It's like, yep, I have record of that.

Or in the case of something that may have been reported to law enforcement. Yeah, I actually have the police report here, and I have their evidence. Not just what I said, but their evidence of what happened.

So we're not just talking about my memory. We're talking evidence of things that actually occurred. We're talking cases.

Like, for instance, the episode that I had about the microwaving of the insulin. There's actually a hospital record. So this isn't about my memory of whether or not insulin was cooked. This was.

I was in the hospital, and there's a hospital record, and there's also an FBI investigation into that. So there's other records and their investigation and their communications to us.

So it's not just my memory that's being analyzed here, and that is the complete record of what happened or didn't happen.

The other thing that the expert was concerned about is, and sort of an accusation came up was, oh, well, you were hypnotized, and false memories were placed in there. Okay, I've heard of that being done. But generally speaking, that means I had to meet with somebody who had access to hypnotize me.

I asked my husband, did I ever meet with someone? He says, nope. And I said, I wouldn't allow that to happen, to have false memories.

And besides, the events, again, that were being questioned, for instance, was the microwaving of the insulin. And that particular situation was brought to our attention by the FBI because they investigated it and found the bottles of insulin.

So this stuff has gone way beyond memory issues and has gone into situations where the authorities have been investigating it. It's not just relying on memories. The other thing, too, is there could be another medical situation.

As I mentioned, sometimes people have memory issues because there's something else. There's Alzheimer's. There's other.

I'm not an expert on Alzheimer's or any other memory issue, but maybe addition to type 1 diabetes, there may be something else that's genetic as far as actual memory issues, and that's not necessarily blamed on diabetes. It could be that they, in addition to the diabetes, they have this other memory issue.

Here's an actress who had down syndrome, and she's very successful as an actress, and her name was Andrea Fay Friedman, and maybe it's pronounced Friedman. I apologize to her family if I pronounced her name incorrectly. I thought that she did really well. Unfortunately, she died at the young age of 53, Ms.

Andrea died of complications of Alzheimer's disease. I read up a little bit.

Again, I'm not an expert on memory based diseases or anything like that and I'm not an expert on down syndrome, but I did do some reading and somewhere it said that down syndrome there tends to be an occurrence of Alzheimer's and it's not uncommon. But see, now I read that. Is that true? Not true. I'm not an expert enough to say that's true.

So somebody with down syndrome could come and refute that and say no, that's not true, that's just genetic. I don't know, I'm not an expert.

That could be something that is a companion disease that occurs percentage wise more frequently with those who have down syndrome. But it's not her down syndrome that was the cause of death. It was the Alzheimer's.

That according to research seems to be something that occurs more frequently with those who have down syndrome. I don't know if it's more frequently or if it's just something that down syndrome tend to also have Alzheimer's. I don't know. Again, not an expert.

And maybe it is the type 1 diabetics also have some of these memory diseases. I don't know that for sure. I haven't dug into that. All I can speak to is myself.

I don't have Alzheimer's, I can't say what's going to happen in the future, but I don't have any of those memory diseases as I'm speaking to you right now.

So whether there's a propensity towards that, even if I did get one of the memory diseases, I don't know if that's something that would be coming with old age. Depends on how old I am or if it's something that's because of the type 1 diabetes.

What I'm speaking to today in this episode is that memory issue in my opinion is not blamed on the type 1 diabetes itself. If there's a memory issue like that, there might be a propensity for diabetics to also have a memory issue.

I don't know, I cannot speak to that one itself.

But I don't think you can make a blanket statement that all type 1 diabetics have memory issues and therefore then stop listening to them and saying, oh well, you don't remember that right because you're type 1 diabetic. That is not. That's a discriminatory statement and that is not a fair statement.

That is like writing off the type 1 diabetic before they Even walk through the door.

And I can tell you, As a type 1 diabetic, that is not fair to the diabetic to invalidate them and reduce their value as a human being just because they have type 1 diabetes. No, that's not right at all. And that's why I'm having this episode here. Now, I will explain.

I happen to have, and I've mentioned this in other episodes, I happen to also have epilepsy. Not a fun combination, but, hey, we look at life as what we can experience and the fun we can have in life, not looking at the downside.

I also have the type of diabetes that can cause seizures. I've got that part under control, but it doesn't mean that a seizure hasn't happened. And the kind that goes with epilepsy.

Now, whether the seizures from diabetes or from epilepsy, that's not for this particular episode. But what happens when I have a seizure is when I come to. It's like the last three to seven days before the seizure are kind of gone from my memory.

Now, the brain is a really cool thing, the way the brain handles it. It's like the brain. And this is my own interpretation, because I can feel my brain mending itself immediately it goes to that part of the brain.

And the seizure itself is not damaging. It's whatever you hit on the way down. Like, I've broken my leg. I'm trying to twist it on a steel desk, and the desk won.

But anyway, that's neither here nor there, but it's. The brain is marvelous how it works. It goes right in there and starts to mend the brain right away.

So even though I can't remember, like, if you ask me, right after a seizure, if you say, hey, Deb, what did you have for breakfast yesterday? I can't remember. I can remember stuff from a couple weeks ago, but the immediate time I have, it's a little fuzzy.

But now, as the brain mends itself, a week later, I'm good, and the memories start to mend.

But that time period of when it was mending itself, like, the days before the seizure come back and that part of the memory is mended because it's almost like the brain protects that part and takes it offline while it's mending itself. But during that time that it was doing the mending.

So, like, say, the next week forward, during that time it was mending that part, even though I'm fully alert, fully functioning that part, the brain says, okay, we're all mended now. Let's Put that offline. It's like picture a hard drive, removable hard drive.

It takes, you can tell I'm a software programmer, take that little hard drive and remove it from the system. And now we're going to take that other little hard drive that we removed at the time of the seizure. We're going to put it back in the system. Now.

Everything that I didn't remember at the time of the seizure that was protected by the brain is back in there. But it feels, it doesn't need that part when it was mending itself. So that part's gone. So it kind of leaves the Swiss cheese effect.

When I was having 120 seizures before they diagnosed me properly, it's like the Swiss cheese effect because there's these little holes.

It doesn't mean I have a memory issue as far as like Alzheimer's or anything, but there's these little holes of where my brain was mending itself after a seizure that I don't remember. Little pockets. And that is a blank page. That's not, I'm not remembering the details accurately. That's literally a blank page.

Because that's during the time that my brain was marvelously healing itself. Now, like I said, it's like having a hard drive removed. If I go ask my husband something and he says, oh yeah, remember we went to this event?

It's like I can access it through an external cable. And like, oh yeah, I do remember that. We did this, this, this and this. So the memory is there and I've written it down or I talked to my husband.

It can be re triggered and recalled. It's just not accessed in the same way because it was during the time that my brain was mending.

But that what I'm describing to you doesn't have anything to do with the diabetes. This is during the time of the. Before I found the right doctor to settle these 120 seizures on the epilepsy.

So this is a completely different scenario, completely different situation, and had nothing to do with the type 1 diabetes. The other thing too, and I have to give my husband credit for this, when you talk about television shows, you notice it's always the con artists.

Or they might bring a therapist in that does try to hypnotize the witness or try to get the witness to think they didn't remember something accurately or they remembered something else. It's always this nefarious thing that's going on. It's again, it's not about the blank page.

It's trying to convince someone they didn't remember what they absolutely did remember and it's like that's what I was being told that I was having was this thing that was more like a television show and that's not what was happening. I'm not a television show so why do I share all this?

As a type 1 diabetic or as one who has had any other circumstances that the world deems as a shortcoming I want you to be careful not to label yourself as falling short of the human race and viewing yourself as less than worthy of the human race just because that's what you have been told all of your life.

Sometimes there is a simple explanation for it like you happen to remember the fun name of your friend's boss when you were a little kid like Leonard Ficklestein. Now go out, pat yourself on the back, live a happy day and remember that you are a valuable member of the human race.

And I'm Deborah and I'll see you in the next episode of DiabeticReal.