Brain Loss

After my son was born five years ago, my brain turned into a bowl of cold oatmeal. You know how congealed and useless oatmeal gets when it's been sitting for a couple of hours untouched? Well, maybe you clean up after breakfast before I do, or your kids finish their oatmeal, but at my house, we actually get to return to the bowl and see this useless, unappealing blob. It's dried on the sides of the bowl, hardened like cement, and then the bulk of it is stuck to itself like homemade paste. I can turn the bowl upside down and it'll stay in place, immobile, flat across the top, lifeless. Like my post-partum brain.

I was scared. I thought I had early-onset Alzheimer's and frantically researched it--as best I could employing the sluggish synapses of cold oatmeal--in hopes of preserving whatever was left of my deteriorating mind. I couldn't remember names, places, directions, reasons for entering a room, what number I was about to dial and why.

My friend Jenne, Cancer Girl, wrote a post about Chemo Brain, that so closely resembled my postpartum brain loss experience, I wanted to share it with you here.

(The last comment, which was probably the first comment, has a four-letter word in it...in case you'd be offended you can stop reading at the end of her post and ignore the comments altogether.)

By the way, see what you think when you read Jenne's post, but I think the sketch in the upper left looks like a chicken leg attached to a thigh, like it comes when you buy a whole chicken cut up.