For the second time in less than a year, I forgot to pay a bill that normally wouldn’t escape my attention. The $13 sum was trivial and the error, like the late mortgage payment, was caught within the grace period. Unlike the utilities (and now the mortgage, too), our credit cards aren’t set to autopay; I use them more like debit cards and clear the balance several times per month to keep utilization low on our credit reports. Now I’ll look into safeguarding that, too.
How this paltry bill escaped my attention, I haven’t the foggiest — an alert was sent 10 days before the due date and I logged in then to pay it, but must have logged out without hitting ‘submit.’ More embarrassingly, I received another alert two days before the due date, but was apparently scatterbrained enough to have dismissed it as something I’d paid the week prior without verifying that was correct. Though this might sound comically trivial, anyone who knows me offline would agree it’s completely out of character.
Lately it feels like I’m slipping in general. It could be a natural byproduct of aging or a sign that I have bigger things to worry about currently than a few bucks I was convinced I’d already repaid. But it could also be a harbinger of cognitive doom, a fear that never would’ve crossed my mind prior to last June, when the neurologist said we’re calling it PD “for now.” It was a reference to something she had just explained — that sometimes patients do well on levodopa to start with and it quickly loses efficacy, which points to atypical Parkinson’s.
Fast-forward nine months and I’m taking levodopa five times a day, not the three originally prescribed, and the doctor’s encouraging me to add another pill here and there as needed. That doesn’t necessarily indicate a waning response — levodopa dosing is tricky even when your intestines aren’t a hindrance — but there are other things I worry about that are also on Crankenstein’s radar. Some of the facial problems I have with dystonia, for example, are associated with atypical PD, while the dystonia in my neck, hand and foot are typical Parkinson’s complaints.*
Part of what made last week so frustrating was that the cavalcade of embarrassments visited upon me weren’t just mental, like the bill screwup or uncharacteristic challenges with time management; there was also the driveway fall and other occasions where physical problems took me out of the moment and derailed my plans. As the week limped to a close, I was ready for something good to happen this weekend. That wish was granted today, when Carlos Alcaraz defended his title and Iga Świątek reclaimed hers at Indian Wells.
Will either of them complete another Sunshine Double two weeks from now in Miami? I look forward to finding out. And I’m eager to get back into the swing of things myself: there’s a review of a Patty Duke movie that should be finished tomorrow, though I’m promising nothing via Mayor McCheese since those updates, coming as they do from a public official’s office, are reserved for deadlines I’m all but certain will be met.
* The eye issue, blepharospasm, improved on levodopa, which was lucky — it’s more common for levodopa to worsen it. The mouth tightness, called oromandibular dystonia, is worse when the pills wear off. There are another couple physical symptoms that could go either way, but who has time for any of that?
Also, I’m not sure what readers picture when I mention stuff like this; whether you imagine me as a pocket-sized version of Cosmo Kramer, attracting stares wherever I go with spastic movements. The reality is less colorful than that (so far I’m the opposite of dyskinetic), or any one of the eight thousand doctors who see me in the average year would’ve picked up on it earlier. You have to know what to look for and most people don’t, so you’d probably only categorize me as awkward (or maybe a little drunk).