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Memory and Chronic Illness
Firsthand lessons in how chronic illness can impact your memory and concentration.
For the longest time, I prided myself on having a picture-perfect memory. The kind of memory that could easily retain and recall all sorts of information — all occasions (special or ordinary), historical dates and events l studied in school, news stories, street maps, plot lines, poems I love, random trivia facts I picked up from bottle caps and magazines, and so much more.
My beautiful, busting-at-the seams memory started to lose its specificity after I was diagnosed with trigeminal neuralgia (TN) in 2017. Between the chronic pain and medication side effects, I found my memory changing, and I had no idea how much that would affect me.
What I noticed
A little more than a year ago, I went to the pharmacy to pick up my prescription. When it was time for me to pay, I had to punch my phone number into the keypad to confirm my identity. And I completely froze. For 30 long seconds, I couldn’t remember my phone number. I could remember my social security number, my husband’s phone number, and my childhood phone number, but not my own. What made it worse was that as I was running through all the numbers in my head, the pharmacist kept talking to me, making it infinitely harder to concentrate.
