Day 23 – Quiz Time! I’m Mad, You’re Mad, The World is Definitely Mad

Clearly at the moment my judgements are off. I don’t trust anything, especially my own mind and I am constantly looking to family and friends to reassure and validate what has just happened in the moment before.

The vast majority of time this is a straight forward eye contact, nothing unusual here reassuring look. A few very minor times it’s been a little more eyes wide, slight alarm and confusion when I’ve clearly just said something a bit nuts and sometimes its laughing because that’s what you’ve got to do in the situations. Buts that’s ok and to be honest it’s pretty funny for me even the alarmist looks.

And then there are all the pure coincidental bonkers things that just KEEP seem to be happening to me or people in close proximity that every family and friend I’ve seen has noticed and been in total hilarious shock about. It’s like I am now just a magnet for madness.

Seeming as it’s 5.30am I thought why not turn it into a game – I’m mad, You’re mad, The World’s mad?

The rules are pretty basic. Each of these true stories has happened since I was diagnosed. After you read them just put them in a category and make your own decision at the end of just who is mad?!

• The Uber driver. Having conversations with strangers when they ask you how you are and what you do is a pretty hard one to answer especially when I’ve never been good with lying. So after a long conversation I gave up and told this very lovely Uber driver about what was happening. He had already told me he was ‘a believer’ but wasn’t being pushy or at all judgmental when I’d said I wasn’t so I’d really warmed to him and he was honestly lovely. Following my disclosure this then somehow led to me allowing him to put his hands on my head when we got out the car, chant and ‘heal’ me. Oh and making me promise I’d download the bible and read a particular scripture. This still makes me laugh but in all honesty if it makes him feel better (which he said it would) then why not?
• The waitress in the restaurant. I’ve been to this Turkish restaurant probably only 2 times in my life and not for years and yet when we walk in the waitress greets me like an old friend. Slightly confused, I’m trying to recognise even tiny bits of her face because let’s face it at the moment she could have been my best friend. Seeing nothing in her, she starts talking about specific things about the last time we were there just a little 2 years ago when Loli was 6mths old. I know my memory is bad in comparison but that’s ridiculous considering how many people she must see. Right?
• Boiling an egg. Time for me is now really warped. I struggle to understand if something happened 2 hours ago or 2 weeks ago. So when I set a timer on my phone to boil an egg but then started doing something else for what felt like a really long time I was totally confused and thought I was genuinely going nuts when I looked back at the timer and it said only 3 seconds had passed. I actually started to panic as I couldn’t believe my sense of time was that off until my dad pointed out that I’d set the timer to 4 hours not 4 minutes and I was looking at the minutes that had passed not the seconds. Wow.
• Watching TV. Similarly, I got genuine fear of what my head was doing when I started watching an episode of Have I Got News For You and suddenly I had the ability to know what each person was about to say. Could this tumour be giving me superhuman powers? I just couldn’t work it out as it was normal BBC1 at the normal broadcast time. I frantically rang Danny so many times and finally sent a text saying ‘I’m worried I’m having de-ja-vu and about to have a seizure’. He called back obviously very worried until I told him what was happening and he explained we’d watched that exact episode just last night. Ummm…
• Getting the tube. I finally convinced my mum I was ok to get the tube back from an appointment by myself so she didn’t have to pick me up from central London and drag Loli with her. What I didn’t factor in was that I had to firstly get on the Metropolitan, Hammersmith & City, Circle and District line. That’s 4 lines all in 1 that is one giant circle with no end either way. For someone that felt at the station like I was a tourist that had never been on the tube before and also someone that had lost the sense of what was east and what was west, I just stared at the signposts with pure and utter confusion. I somehow absentmindedly got swept up in the crowd onto a platform where I just got on the next tube that was coming. I sat down and then tried to look for my stop on the map above the seats. Again starting to panic, I couldn’t see the stop and I couldn’t work out if any of the stops were near or in the direction of where I was going. Turning in alarm to the stranger next to me I asked her and she gently and kindly explained that there were 2 completely different maps, the one I was looking at and another I couldn’t see as we were on a Circle and District train that services both routes but yes I had somehow managed to make it on to the right train. Next time I’m sticking to the straight and simple Central Line.
• Someone at the door. About 5 times in the last few days I’ve been walking up the stairs and heard a knock at the front door. I run down, open the door, stare out left and right to find no-one there. Laughing and bemused, I’ll close the door again, walk back up the stairs and remember we have step in our creaking old house that sounds exactly like a door knock when you heavy foot it. My neighbours who have already seen some pretty crazy things around our house in the last few weeks must actually think I’m bonkers.
• Double vision. A dear friend of mine sent me a video of some joke filming she’d done at work for a staff training video. I was about to watch some TV when I opened it up on my phone and laughed a lot at how amazing she looked as a male news presenter with a wig and moustache. I then flicked on the remote. Within a minute this man appeared who looked identical to her character and I was just so shocked and bewildered (see main picture above of both her and the presenter). Seriously what are the chances?
• Mi mama. Anyone who has met mi mama knows exactly what I mean when I say she is a mad little Spanish woman. She has more energy than most 15 year olds, is hilarious and totally crazy. She’s Loli’s absolute best friend and we all laugh so much together. Spending this much time with her recently has been truly magical although she frequently manages to get me in situations where I’m questioning what the hell is going on. Yesterday it was her saying the car wouldn’t open and her keys weren’t working, this went on with both of us trying to get in for a good few minutes until she realised it wasn’t even her car. The day before it was trying to direct her using google maps when a notification kept flashing up saying it will take 1.5 hrs to get to the ‘Post Box’. She swears that she has no idea why google maps is doing this or what it is talking about but knowing my mother it has a lot more of a clue than either of us at the moment.