Please G-d – I Just Want to Be Me of Four Hours Ago

We’ve all had nightmares. Thankfully, it seems mine was just another nightmare.

It was far more vivid than that, but I won’t go into too many details. In the dream, I was about five percent of myself in memory, cognition, coherence, and almost every other mental faculty. It was a nightmare, not physically, but intellectually.

Certainly no Stephen King or Jilly Cooper. To most people, it would probably have been the most boring dream in the world. To me, it was completely terrifying because of its normality.

I was in my old office in London, the office where I worked when I left London twenty years ago. My old team was there, but I was completely confused. I couldn’t remember which project I had been working on. My boss met me and fired me on the spot. I couldn’t understand what was happening, and I couldn’t find my way out.

My brain felt like goo.

As I woke up, I became completely frightened. This wasn’t a nightmare. This was my new self, a confused person with PSP, no longer the same person who had gone to bed a few hours earlier.

For ten or fifteen minutes, with my wife’s help, I gradually returned to myself. I took my morning pills, drank a lot of soda, went to the bathroom, listened to some classical music, had an espresso, and decided to write this article.

Writing it by dictation is my way of proving to myself that I can still articulate what I’m thinking.

Thankfully, I feel okay now.

Part of me wants to go back to bed because I’m mentally exhausted. Part of me is in a lot of pain and wants to take more painkillers. But, strangely, the pain is also reassuring. It reminds me that I’m alive, awake, and still myself.

It is pain for which I would have taken a much stronger painkiller only a few hours ago. For the moment, I’m prepared to endure it. I have taken only a mild painkiller for the headache I’ve had.

A thought came to me about faith.

There is a prayer I say upon waking. It is very brief. A few Hebrew words translate as: “You have restored my soul with mercy.” I said it five times.

All I wanted was to be the person who had gone to bed a few hours earlier.

At that moment, I didn’t want to be the big boss, the traveller, or the healthy forty-year-old. I wanted to be exactly the same person I had been a few hours before, the person who had written a blog acknowledging that he was sometimes at his worst with his wife.

That person was now being helped by his wife to get out of bed.

I was truly grateful for seemingly small mercies.

The same person. Not miraculously cured or physically stronger, but still the same person living with PSP that I had been a few hours earlier.

Thank G-d, I am still that person.

I may be in a wheelchair. I may be in pain. My arm may be very weak. I may be facing a future I don’t want.

But right now, I am grateful to be myself.

A few hours ago, I went to bed.

Funny what we pray for.