My new friend “Dave”
I recently had a long conversation with a friend about my MS, and he gave me a new notion that I like very much. I had told my friend that while I was looking up some old files, I ran across the initial report I had written for a venture capitalist who was considering a startup company for seed investment. As I read the report, I was repeatedly struck by the fact that it had been written by A Very Smart Person—one to whom I could NOT relate, not in the slightest. Even though that person had been me.
I was shocked by my response to that report—and not just by the knowledge that I could no more produce a report like that now than I could fly to the moon. I was also struck—hard—by how strongly I felt that the writing in the report, and the thinking behind it, were both utterly foreign to me.
My friend was, as always, very thoughtful in his responses to my funk. He is a person who has thought a lot, and very deeply, about Thinking. From his Ph.D. dissertation, through a long and successful career, to the present day, he has devoted intense consideration to thought processes and how they work. I value his insights enormously—as well as his patience in talking with me about various MS issues. He understands the heartache better than anyone except a person who actually has the disease and has suffered numerous cognitive and physical deficits.
Anyway, at one point in our conversation, he said that my difficulty was reminding him of the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey,” in the scene where astronaut Dave Bowen forces his way back into the spaceship and starts pulling out, one after another, the operating modules of wayward supercomputer HAL’s “Logic Memory Center.” As HAL loses his higher brain functions, he says, “I’m afraid. I’m afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going.”
Yep, that’s exactly how I feel, every time I notice some new lossage, or I’m faced with something that reminds me I’m not the person I used to be—physically or mentally. Since the MS is stealing my brain just as relentlessly as Dave took HAL’s, I will now refer to my disease on certain occasions as “Dave.” That will give it a slightly silly sci-fi inference, and for me, that’s a happier association than the more clinical “MS.”
I’ll take a chuckle any time I can get it!
(Oh, and the VC? He invested.)