#early-onset dementia

[godisarepublican]

[lastoneout]

so uh. noticed that my palalia comes back when I'm overstimulated. maybe uh. something to mention to a doctor at some point.

[mushed-kid]

take two

[marrow-bone]

Been re-watching Still Wakes the Deep and I really wonder if anyone on the story team had experience with dementia because. Yeah. What the people sound/act/think like in that game is very familiar.

[1495-gauge]

You're a medicinal apprentice of the Pearl clan, and today, your clan found a ghost-touched elder out in the snow.

It's your job to help him, even if this too tall man, covered in strange clothing, is babbling in tongues. His hair is a dull grey, his eyes shine vacant, and his extremities are in desperate need for treatment of frostbite.

He's got a head wound. The other healers, you hear them discuss how that must be making it all worse. He looks deceptively young — but he can't be, eyes glowing like a man with a claim on his soul.

None of you know where he could have come from. You're surprised the patrol didn't think he was a zoroark. They probably did. But as you pump his fingers, encouraging sluggish blood back into them, you can feel he is very, very real.

It's a duty, to serve those older than you, even when they're marked like this. The ghost-touched end up like children, tantrums and illogical and lost. Until the ghost that caused it finds the light of the fire it left behind their eyes again, until it can steal them away forever.

You are spending a lot of medicinal resources on a man who will certainly not last the winter.

You believe it's compassion. The clan takes him in, and when he finally remembers a few real words, they welcome in Ingo, to make his stay, however short, kind.

But it's not as short as you expect — as anyone expects.

Each passing day, his twisted words resolve slowly into real language once more. Strange utterances still pepper his speech, but he's becoming knowable. He communicates, his memories have been robbed from him. And everyone believes him, because what else could leave a man so old unable to fend for himself?

You're worried for him. He doesn't remember to be cautious. You patch up his cuts and scrapes he develops from exploring the outskirts of camp, it's spring and he's still here. It would be something to rejoice if his eyes didn't still glow. If his fate wasn't still so very clear.

It's cruel, to draw it out. None of you want him to leave, this kind old man who has forgotten everything, volume control especially, but who plays with the children and does his best to relearn tasks and is that sort of gentle that can only be a product of experience, however lost. None of you want him gone, but it's cruel that the ghost coming for him is taking its time. Letting him regrow a life for himself. Letting others become attached.

You can see how everyone is thinking it, when they look at him more with pity, when they keep a bit of distance. You have no choice, his designated healer now, and he certainly comes to your tent regularly. Not just for healing, but with berries as gifts, little wood carvings that look like they were made by a child as apology for all the work he makes you do. You cannot reject any of it, and the ties anchoring you to this lost soul grow stronger.

You'd feel resentful, but you can't.

Time passes, and come summer, his penchant for being unafraid of the wildlife becomes a problem. He ends up bringing home a gligar, getting poisoned so often he becomes the sole user and contributor to your pecha stores. They may as well be housed with him, but he seems to enjoy checking in on you while halfway to his deathbed due to his companion's stinger. Over time, he comes in less, less due to his companion gaining better control, more due to his own developing immunity.

The day Lady Sneasler chooses him as her warden, many wonder if there was a claim on his soul at all.

But you can't forget how he came here, eyes flashing in the light, bereft of language and life and skills. Even now, he is often nonsensical, well meaning but lost. Meant for the next world.

He takes to it well, and survives to the next winter, and the next, growing his impossible team of companions. You've never seen anyone guide pokemon in the way he does, and you wonder how much of it is that insane lack of fear that could only be caused by having his soul unmoored and his former life stripped away.

When the sky breaks open, the nobles frenzy. You have little time to worry about your favorite patient, because instead you're treating wounds from pokemon that should have never hurt anyone.

He starts to guide people, showing up in the morning, taking them where they need to go — especially through the highlands. From what you've heard, the rift has made the pokemon there untameable. You worry for him, but all you get are reports of how he must be remembering his past as a fierce warrior, because how else could he so confidently command pokemon and people alike? How else could he face off and win against alpha pokemon that attack his caravans, make them his companions as well?

He uses the capture devices that the foreigners in the fieldlands do, and one night, he shows you how the pokemon can escape them on their own — they're more for ease, he says. It's much easier to carry his team like this. You imagine the towering pokemon he's showed you being led through camp, and you agree the balls are a good idea.

The sky turns red, and you don't hear from him.

The sky turns blue, and you don't hear from him.

But he returns, and says he's remembering, now. He'll be staying down with Jubilife, for a while. Battling, helping the foreigner who fell from the sky and calmed Almighty Sinnoh. He says, he may be able to go home.

You don't let him see how those words could bring you to tears. His clock has always been near running out, you knew this. But he had never seemed to.

Eventually, he does his rounds. Says his goodbyes. He's standing up straighter, seeming younger, a last burst of energy, you think. He thanks you, for everything you've done.

He goes to the mountain, and he doesn't come back.

You erect a little memorial in your home, for the man with eyes that glowed far longer than anyone's ever had before. For the man who loved the world, pokemon, battling. You hope, wherever he is beyond this world, he is happy, and safe. That the man he was and the man he became can reconcile. You thank his spirit, for the time it spent in your life, and the next time one of the clan's elders loses their mind to the ghosts of the land, it's him you think of as you care for them.

[cindelsclouds]

Being a schizo is wild. One moment I'm okay and the next I've completely forgotten who I am, what I'm doing, why I'm doing it, who I'm with, and where I am. I lose all sense of identity and memory. My head felt so light as I looked around and couldn't recognize my own house. Not even my own family. I was completely disconnected from reality. And I did that shit sober lmao. Can't believe people need wine or drugs to feel that, I had that shit built in chemically. Kinda freaky if you ask me but it's also like a super useless mentally deteriorating superpower.

[fourgottencoast]

You’ll be starting to see more and more posts normalizing the symptoms of long covid/covid damage (as isolated things completely separate from covid of course, wouldn’t want to start confronting that!!🙄) and I just want to reiterate to y’all that it is NOT normal to experience brain fog, memory problems, and/or chronic fatigue in your 20s/30s. Don’t fall for propaganda that normalizes a deadly and mass disabling disease, don’t be a willing participant in eugenics and pls speak out and mask up!!

[allpromarlo]

don’t let sukuna being a hater ass bitch distract you from the fact that yuji is HIM

[valentinesparda]

i love my coworkers at the other branch I get to work at but if I have to hear the phrase "everyone is a little ADHD" in all seriousness ever I will always feel like I have rabies

[i-amusemyself]

my villain origin story is gonna be seeing zero people in a hospital with masks on during an airborne pandemic (and I still won't be as fucking evil as all the maskless fuckers there).

[rdlain]

Asked my passenger-princess for directions by telling her to "pull up MapQuest" ?!?!?!?!?!?! ?!?!?!!?

[weedpicnic]

Me when I actually just had a monemrntal realization but it’s too late for me to realize it because I accidentally dried and drowned out the realiszion with media consumption lmaoooooo

[bitchfitch]

also while I'm thinking on the ADHD thing: Nothing will ever drive home the fact afabs are Dramatically less likely to get diagnosed with ADHD despite showing all the same symptoms than the fact that when i was a teenager my docs spent months trying to prove early onset dementia Before they put an ADHD screening test in front of me.

[californiaquail]

literally wrote "don't forget sandwich" on my hand so i didn't forget my breakfast sandwich in the fridge at work well guess what i forgot. and now it has to spend the weekend in the work fridge. 😐

[aorish]

anime dubs are pretty bad but let's not kid ourselves most live-action television dialogue is NOT significantly better.

[explodingcrayon]

old people are crazy in an almost impressive way, dude. was talking to my mother about dungeons & dragons the tabletop game and she somehow took it as a sign that i wanted to listen to her rant about the green new deal and nuclear power and other fux news rhetoric. then was happy to go back to game design talk. like she genuinely fully believed the two were not vaguely related, but directly related, almost basically the same topic kind of related. That's a level of mental gymnastics that even cirque du soleil can't compete with.