Maria Rosa Jurado
Guayaquil, Ecuador
I know this title sounds like a romance novel, but it has nothing to do with that. I actually want to write about a guest who came into my life in the year 2020, who would come to stay, transforming everything forever.
I had studied Law, I had my master’s degree in Administrative Law and four diplomas, when the strange guest manifested himself. We began to realize why my husband was surprised that he did not pass him the glass of water that he had asked me for. And I hadn’t done it because I was in a parallel reality, like in an unreal bubble where I couldn’t see any glass. At work they told me pass me the report, I asked where it is, and the answer was: in front of her eyes, lawyer; which bothered me a lot because I couldn’t see it and I’m not blind.
Months later, when i was diagnosed with alzheimer, they explained to me that one of the early symptoms was that he couldn’t identify the things he was seeing. The glass of water, the report, were in front of my eyes, I could see them, but my brain couldn’t identify them.
I would have continued without knowing that I had Alzheimer’s, if it weren’t for the fact that one Saturday, in the last week of December 2020, returning from a friend’s house in Los Ceibos, I ended up wandering around completely lost for hours, until my husband found me after midnight. midnight on Trinitarian Island. How I got lost, that moment of terror I felt while driving in complete darkness, and how I called on my dead father to save me, was so intense that maybe I’ll tell another time.
Then came the exams. First in Guayaquil and then in Bogotá, where they treated me at the prestigious Santa Fe Foundation. My husband was initially told by a doctor that he might have “Lewis body dementia,” which is so terrible that when actor Robin Williams found out he had it, he committed suicide. We also feared that it might be Parkinson’s. So when we were diagnosed with incipient Alzheimer’s, the mildest disease of all we’d been told, we even cheered.
When we broke the news to my family it was chaos. Everyone was crying. I did not accept, I felt furious. The doctors explained that my intelligence and memory were still not affected, thanks to what they described as “a great cognitive reserve” resulting from my habit of reading for at least an hour almost every day for the last forty years, my university studies , my master’s degree and my diplomas.
A doctor said that genetically I must have suffered from Alzheimer’s after the age of 80 as some women in my family have. When I was diagnosed, I was 56. And the possibility has been suggested that perhaps the covid that I suffered in 2020 advanced it to me.
I didn’t know anything about this disease, but my aunt María Hercilia suffered from it, and I remember her sitting on a sofa with her eyes lost, but when a loved one arrived, her eyes would light up and she would say their name.
Since I was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s I have never been able to drive or go out alone again, due to the danger of getting lost. I stopped practicing as a lawyer, I constantly lose things, and I need someone to help me with daily tasks.
I was the youngest daughter, who was never allowed to do anything because she was little, and she dreamed of being free and independent. And when I grew up, I was. I had two children, I worked in the civil service, which I liked very much, and I enjoyed full freedom so that now they have to take care of me again, and they don’t let me do anything again.
Fortunately I have someone to take care of me. Each friend watches over me in her own way, I feel a lot of affection around me. I no longer work with codes, but I am learning to paint pointillism on stone, I mold objects in ceramics and take dance classes. It helps me to focus on the here and now, in an eternal present, which gives me peace, and helps me to carry the disease with serenity.
As the cumbia says, I carry my cross and I don’t give it to anyone, and I don’t give it to anyone, and I don’t give it to anyone, because we all already carry a cross. I once read that García Márquez had written his memoirs, “Live to tell it,” when he was already suffering from Alzheimer’s. I am not García Márquez, but I think I will still be able to write a few more articles before the curtain falls. So far I’m doing well, as the optimist said.