Am I Going Nuts?

Am I Going Nuts? February 20, 2016

Some time back, I had a two-part appointment with a health care professional. I’m going to be deliberately vague about the type of professional and the nature of the appointment and how long ago this was, in order to protect the privacy of someone else in the story; I’ll just say that it wasn’t any sort of health crisis, just preventive medicine.

Part one was a battery of preliminary tests administered by a nurse, while part two involved meeting with the professional herself for a review of those preliminary tests, plus some further tests and a detailed exam.

(She may have been a technician or physician’s assistant, I’m actually not sure of her full credentials. I’ll stick with “nurse” for purposes of this piece.)

Part one was uneventful, except that the nurse and I had a nice conversation. When she asked me about implanted medical devices, we got off on a tangent where I ended up mentioning how a friend of mine got an implanted pacemaker after a sudden cardiac arrest and how I’d been part of the CPR response, and that got us talking about her experiences in emergency care.

(By the way, go buy a Telesma album or DVD and help Ian and his bandmates out.)

Our conversation wasn’t an intimate heart-to-heart, but it was deeper than you might have with a stranger in line at the grocery store. It was the sort that you’re still thinking of the next day, that reminds you that everyone around you has a life experience as deep as yours.

So when I came in for part two and my professional started to go over the preliminary results, I was a surprised and saddened to learn that my nurse was out on medical leave after experiencing a psychotic break. It touched me that someone with whom I’d made a little bit of a momentary connection, and who was a competent professional who had helped many people, had experienced something so intense and debilitating.

"Maniac in a strait-jacket in a French asylum", Wellcome Images via WikiMedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)
“Maniac in a strait-jacket in a French asylum”, Wellcome Images via WikiMedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

And then things got confusing.

My professional pulled out a sheet of paper and started to go over it. “Now your results on this test were a little abnormal…”

“Um.” I felt a small but almost physical disorientation. “This is weird, but…I don’t remember that test.” And it was something unusual that I’d never had before, something I think I’d have remembered. My professional described it in more detail, and it rang no bells.

Well, she wanted to re-do it anyway since the results were abnormal, and I “passed” this time with a normal result. But it was definitely something I think I should have remembered if I gone through it before.

So I was left wondering. Is there a gap in my memory? I remembered all the other tests, and the one in question didn’t involve administering drugs or anything that would cause amnesia. Or was my nurse already starting to lose touch, did she neglect the test and fabricate the results, or perhaps imagine performing them?

One of us was not fully in touch with reality that day. (I suppose it’s theoretically possible that we’d both slipped, in different ways, but let’s keep it simple.) Since I’m still being allowed to roam around unsupervised (as amazed as that may leave some of my critics), I guess the odds are that my recollection is accurate, and that my poor nurse was already starting to experience some sort of dissociative symptoms.

But I can never be sure. This routine bit of business becomes a topic of doubt. It reminds me of how contingent and fragile our picture of the world — and of our selves — is.

It reminds me of how many fundamental assumptions we make to get through the day. We assume our memories are more-or-less accurate, we assume our senses more-or-less reflect some public external reality, we assume that other people experience their lives in the same sort of way that we do. But these are all unprovable. Indeed psychology has repeatedly shown the unreliability of memory and perception.

Heck, to even try to use logic to figure out the world we have to assume logical rules. You have to assume a rule of inference like modus ponens (“If A then B; A; therefore B”), you don’t get it for free. Sure, it seems obvious and empirically it seems to work very well. But the same can be said of Euclid’s axioms about geometry; yet we eventually found non-Euclidean geometry valid and useful.

The idea “maybe everything we think we know about reality is wrong” isn’t something invented recently in late-night stoned conversations about The Matrix. It goes back at least to Chuang Tzu, the ancient Taoist who famously dreamed he was a butterfly and upon awakening realized that he couldn’t be sure if he was a man who had just woken up from a dream of being a butterfly, or a butterfly now having a dream of being a man. If you’ve ever woken up from a dream, gone about your morning business while musing about it and thinking to yourself “Wow, what a strange dream” — and then really(?) woken up, perhaps you can relate.

And what’s amazing is that this sort of sudden collapse of worldview does actually happen sometimes. Recently in the news was a man who had been living in Saint Catharines, Ontario for thirty years when he suddenly remembered that he was someone else. He had suffered a head injury and lost his memory, and created a whole new life and identity for himself. Only now, decades later, did his old life come back to him.

Who can say that it couldn’t happen to us? That we might suddenly find our identity and our personal history changed by remembering something forgotten…or that we might at some future time find that our perceptions are they currently are, are warped by some psychosis we perceive only after it has passed. (I hope and trust that happened for my nurse, that she recovered fully and can look back on the experience with some wonder.)

Am I nuts?

I’ll never know for sure.


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