I take out my notepad and note down the symptoms
Hallucinations, insomnia, sleep paralysis, behavioral changes, screams in the middle of the night, inability to read, panic attacks, anxiety, and confusion.
I know these resemble my wife’s symptoms and I am fearful that these could only lead to her condition. I am a broken soul who has suffered the loss of my better half and I cannot survive through another loss. The sun is slowly climbing up the clear blue sky and the fear of those hallucinations makes me so nervous. Nick is right, it is not depression, it is far worse than just befriending the blues, it is a merger between the night and the day, no dusk or dawn in between, no boundary between reality and dreams.
The inability to sleep coupled with the fear of sleeping sends shivers down my spine. It makes me anxious. I don’t get how Ciara went through it or how she managed to pass her last days.
Dear Ben,
You know that I love reading so please just tell them to return my books to me. Tell them that it is not from the novels. I just can’t read, but that’s all. I need them to let me hold on to sanity. If everything that is dear to me is snatched from me, how am I to live through another day?
I let this sickness sacrifice you and Nick, please not this. I won’t hurt myself, I promise. Just tell them, I won’t scream, I’ll try to be myself, just tell them. It is hurting now, you know, it’s something I can’t handle. It aches everywhere, each cell. It’s a dull ache but it keeps increasing in intensity. So please, help. Help anyway possible I don’t know what has happened to me. I never thought that I would ever scratch the walls or stare into them for hours at end or pull my hair.
I love you and Nick, take care of my son, you two are the brightest stars I have seen and I promise, I will tell the angel of death to turn me to a star with the brightest glow and hang above you two to enlighten your ways.
Love, Ciara xoxo.
I have been at the hospital all through the day, tests after tests have only scared me to insanity. I don’t want to see this again but no matter how hard I try to push away the quickly emerging truth, it keeps coming after me. My escape is only an unheard wish in my heart. I look into the night’s fabric; dark with a few scattered stars stitched into the sky.
There she is, I think to myself as a bright star looks down upon me and open the MRI. I am not sure if I want to know the truth but I can’t deny it any further. The scan looks familiar to my wife’s, areas of the brain shrinking. Now, I have the proof with me too so there is no hoping that I can be mistaken but Nick has been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia just like his mother.
