These are things I can do in an hour and if I don’t feel like doing them I don’t have to. Loud noise, bright lights too many people moving around, it does something to me. I have a hard time explaining it, it’s like I get overwhelmed and start getting confused, this scares me and I get kind of panicky and frustrated. I don’t know why this happens, but it’s well documented also. The three day thing I was talking about earlier, I wore a heart rate monitor and BP machine the whole time. Every time it started getting loud or busy around me or I was asked to do things that required concentration my pulse and BP would start to skyrocket, I don’t know why and neither do they, at least according to them. I have an engineering background, as you can imagine there is a lot of math involved. During my neuropsych testing I could not figure out simple algebra, I drew a complete blank. The hardest part of the testing for me was the math, but when I was in school doing calculus my fellow students used to joke and call me the rainman. My working memory test score came in in the 99.5th percentile, one in two hundred people could recite the problems back like I could, but when I would go to bed at night and wake up the next morning it was like eighty percent of the day before had not happened. The analogy I used with the doctors was that it was like going out and drinking too much and talking to your friends the next day. They would say do you remember standing on the bar with a lampshade on your head and the answer would be no, but the more it was talked about, the more I would remember (please remember it’s just an analog. That’s the way it was for a very long time, and as I stated earlier it seems to be getting better and they think it is because my brain is learning new ways to remember and maybe creating new pathways.
Just a few quick examples of stupid things I have done…
Fixing the brakes on my truck. When I was done I tried to back out of the yard to test them and the truck would not move, I had no idea why…it was because I did not put the wheel back on and it was still on the jack.
I tried to build a new deck for my house, it was all framed in and I loaded the deck boards on and jumped up to start nailing them down. the whole thing fell off the house because I had just tacked the framing on to get it level and I forgot to secure it.
I was going some painting in the garage using a spray gun and compressor. I had to blow off the piece I was working on and then clean the gun with some lacquer thinner, I plugged the gun in and blew a seam out of it, I forgot to turn the pressure down. lacquer went flying everywhere and I was lucky I did not have the fire on in the stove. ( Don’t beat me up about the possibility of that happening to the gun, it was a very cheap, like $10.00, gun I was using for priming.)
There are countless other stories of these things happening, but I think you get the point, I am a liability. That coupled with the fact that these things have absolutely drained my confidence and I am afraid to try to do a lot of things. I have not used an ashtray in over seven years because I kept leaving the smokes sitting there and forgot about them and I can’t use a stove because I forget to turn it off when I am done. Keep in mind I was, I think, well respected in my job and was responsible for millions of dollars worth of very high end equipment. I designed, manufactured and installed, by myself, safety systems to protect employees from robots. The engineering team used to refer to me as the golden boy, because if there were problems, I made them go away keeping my employers in a good light with the people who contracted them to do the work, and they always questioned why I always had a smile on my face regardless of the pressure I was under, $97,000.00 an hour for a shutdown, and for the most part worked by myself. I designed systems, built them, installed them, programmed robots and machinery, did all the mechanical work, supervised their maintenance guys, taught operators courses in how to run the machinery, dealt with upper management, you name it a one man show, the whole time being on call 24/7. I wouldn’t leave until I had everything fixed, I seen me one day come in at in the morning with the day shift and I was still there when they came in for there next shift because it was that important to get the line up and running. I did not take a vacation in six years and I never called in sick or missed a day of work. I played hockey (sometimes leave work, drive for an hour to the rink, play, get a shower and go back to work after already doing a twelve hour shift) went to the gym, raised my family and always made it so I could have a few beers with my friends on Friday night. So am I lazy, not a chance. Did I love what I did, you bet. Do I miss it, goddamn right I do.
I really tried to avoid these details because I am not one for blowing my own horn, pretty much everything I have done in my life, I have done like this…to the very best of my ability, but I would swear over my kids head that what I said above is not even the slightest exaggeration of reality.
So to answer your question of why exactly can’t I work, I don’t know. I think it’s because I can no longer function that way, and any other way is completely foreign to me. I have no confidence, I am afraid i will screw up and hurt someone, and I can no longer “think straight”. All of this I have proven to myself time and time again as I showed in the earlier examples.
