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Dementia or senior moment

GoogleUGrad

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This is a new one for me, I've never worried about dementia before. I guess it's a nice little segue from always having to worry about cancer.

I’m 49. Lately I’ve noticed I’m just a lot slower at choosing my words. Like I have to speak much more slowly and sometimes it takes a second for me to find the right word. I don’t mean with complicated words but with everyday words. I just feel slower than normal. Also when my kids ask me to define a word, I find I often really struggle to do it. Until now I’ve just kind of thought it must be normal aging.

But here’s the thing that really freaked me out. While I was preparing dinner the other night my son was making a dessert. It was very chaotic in the kitchen with both of us in there and everyone else running in and out grabbing stuff, and me trying to get dinner on the table. He asked me to grab a bag of powdered sugar for him and I remember doing it. But after that, no one could find the bag of powdered sugar. We looked everywhere. Eventually I just told him to open a new one.

The next morning my husband found the bag of powdered sugar stuffed into the drawer where we keep plastic spoons and ladles and stuff. The weird thing is when he told me where he found it, I suddenly had a vague, sort of dreamlike memory of actually stuffing it in that drawer. I don’t know why I would have done that unless it’s because I’m totally effing losing it.

Does this sound like normal aging to anyone or is it time to see a neurologist? I will add that the pandemic has been really stressful for me, I’m feeling very overwhelmed and sometimes depressed and now am really hoping that’s the cause of some of these symptoms. But stuffing a bag of powdered sugar into a utility drawer is just …. Weird. Both my grandmothers died from Alzheimer’s disease but neither of them got it until their late 70s/80s.
 

cheer_mom

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Are you taking any medications? Sometimes meds will cause a brain fog. I have experienced that. It wouldn't hurt to call your doctor and getting him know what happened. I'm sure it is just because you were stressed and it was so chaotic in the kitchen though.
 

GoogleUGrad

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No meds, at least, nothing different than usual ... just allergy medication and occasional Tylenol. I do also kind of wonder if maybe I had asymptomatic COVID at some point and the brain fog is from that, since it started during the pandemic. But that seems less likely since I have a large family and no one else in my household had COVID.
 

Iugrad91

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I don’t think it’s aging or dementia, it’s just a goof you made while trying to get dinner on the table in the midst of some chaos in the kitchen. Not everything has to have a reason behind it.
 

suzzeeb

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When I'm stressed or my anxiety is bad I do all kinds of weird things. I have put things totally in the wrong place and it freaks me out. Over the last months I have not been sleeping well and I do take Klonopin to help with sleep and during my worst anxiety I was forgetting all kinds of things and found my mayonnaise in my pantry instead of the fridge. I think it is common or else I really have dementia! Oh great, now I'm worried about that.
 

GoogleUGrad

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Thanks for the comments, that does help. I probably ought to just wait until things are more normal and there's less stress before I start to worry ... but you know how it is!
 
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