Diary of a Scribbler: A Handbook of "Miracle Cures", Antivirals, Immune System Boosters and Stress Busters

By Esme Sinclair

When I first realised that a "miracle herb" had prevented my asthma attacks and stopped me wheezing, somewhat miraculously, during the first few months of my battle against lung disease in my early forties, I started to study herbal medicines in the University of Life. Thus far, I haven't had an asthma attack or wheezed for 17 years. After other "miracle herbs" cured some of my other ailments, it occurred to me that I ought to write my book, Diary of a Scribbler, based on records I have kept in my journals of what occurred after I began to experiment with herbal medicines in my early forties, some 17 years ago. 
I have listed below some — but not all — of the conditions which herbal medicines, minerals and super-foods have cured or reversed between my early forties and late fifties. 
- How I lost more than 7 stone in weight in my fifties, aided by my Fat Burning Plan. - How I reversed my dementia in 2014 with herbal medicines, super-foods, amino acids, vitamins and minerals.  - How I stopped a stroke from paralysing me with an amino acid.  - How raw garlic saved my life during a major angina attack.  - How a miracle herb prevented my asthma attacks for 17 years.  - How this herb boosts immunity and may combat the effects of the coronavirus combined with the black box and herbal antivirals.  - How I cured my psoriasis in 2019 with a super-food and a herbal tea  - How I cured my fibromyalgia in 2014.  - How a miracle herb reduced the inflammation in my lungs and stopped asthma attacks for 17 years. How this anti-inflammatory, combined with herbal antivirals could be used to combat the coronavirus.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Sep 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9781838596484

Book preview

Copyright © 2020 Esme Sinclair

The moral rights of the author have been asserted by her.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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Neither the author nor the publisher of this book is giving professional medical advice or services to the reader. The contents of this book are purely a record of real events, which show that the author improved some aspects of her health with a healthy diet, some herbal medicines, minerals and amino acids, to a greater or lesser extent, while she was going through the wars in her fifties. The ideas and methods she used to cure what ailed her are not intended as a substitute for consulting with your medical doctor. Neither the author nor the publisher shall be liable or responsible for any loss or damage allegedly arising from any information or suggestion contained in this book.

Contents

PART ONE

‘HOW DO YOU KNOW IT’S HYPERTENSION?’

‘DEAR NIECE ESME…’

‘DIDN’T YOUR TEACHERS SPEAK TO YOU?’

DEMENTIA

THE STROKE

‘I NEED SOME GARLIC!’

THE 50 FOOT WOMAN

ANGEL WINGS

‘HOW DID YOU HAPPEN TO HAVE GABA IN THE CUPBOARD?’

THE SCRIBBLER

‘A LONG STORY ABOUT MEANINGLESS SCRIBBLES!’

RANGOON - BURMA (MYANMAR)

THE JOHNSONS

‘LOOK IT ARP IN THE DICTIONARY!’

‘WHY CAN’T I BE HAPPY LIKE THEM?’

‘ESME! ESME! ARE YOU UP?’

MR GUTHRIE

DR BRIARS

HOUSE OF PINK CARPETS

FORCE AND RATHBONE ENGINEERING

‘I WON’T PUSH YOUR WHEELCHAIR!’

‘THE FINNS LEAD THE WORLD IN EDUCATION…’

STRANGE INCIDENTS

PART TWO

‘GOD! WHAT’S HAPPENING TO ME?’

‘I THINK I’VE GOT A HERNIA!’

‘IF YOU TELL DR FLORENCE THAT SHE’LL CERTIFY YOU!’

‘A LOADED LUGER OR CYANIDE…’

‘IF YOU CAME TO THE WEDDING, WHAT WOULD YOU EAT?’

‘I CAN’T IMAGINE ESME EVER BEING SHY!’

RUBBER GLOVES

‘WHAT’S HAPPENING TO YOU?’

‘IT’S ALL THIS FOOD YOU’RE EATING!’

‘MARCEL’S MOVING HOUSE…’

‘SCRIBBLE IT DOWN!’

‘HOW DID YOU LIKE YOUR DIARIES?’

‘I’VE GOT THIRTY DAYS TO LIVE!’

‘DON’T BE A VICTIM, DARLING…’

A PLACE IN THE SUN

‘ARGENTINA, HERE I COME!’

‘I DON’T REMEMBER TAKING THEM…’

THE STALKER

PART THREE

‘YOU WENT INTO MY ALADDIN’S CAVE…’

‘BOIL AND SIMMER…’

MR SWEET

HOW I ‘LOST’ MORE THAN SEVEN STONE IN MY FIFTIES

STRESS BUSTERS, HOW I REDUCED MY MENOPAUSE SYMPTOMS NATURALLY AND MAINTAINED WEIGHT LOSS

THE BOOK-THROWING INCIDENT

‘WE NEED TO GET CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET’

‘WHAT HAVE I DONE?’

HOW I REVERSED MY DEMENTIA

HOW I CURED MY FIBROMYALGIA (FMS) AND BACK PAIN

MICHAEL RECCIA

PROFESSOR PIERCE

HERCULES

‘GENIUS IS CAUGHT IN ORIGINAL THOUGHT…’

JOSEPH

A BUNSEN BURNER

‘DON’T FORGET I’M GOING SAMARITANING…’

SYLVIA

‘LOOK AT THIS HOUSE!’

‘JUST SIMPLY CALL ME AN ANARCHIST!’

‘ESME…IT LOOKS LIKE BOJO WON!’

THE LIBRARY

THE DOOR-TO-DOOR SALESMAN

‘…AN EARTHQUAKE, MAGNITUDE 2.9’

‘YOU WON’T BE READY THEN…’

FRACKING

AN INSPIRING LETTER

‘I’M UGLY!’

‘YOU’RE GETTING INTO DEEP WATER…’

HOW I CURED MY PSORIASIS WITH IMMUNE SYSTEM BOOSTERS AND A ‘MIRACLE HERB’ WHICH COULD COMBAT THE CORONAVIRUS

NURSE SPENCER

KUDZU

VASELINE… A MIRACLE CURE

‘JESUS CAN HEAR YOU…’

‘BE A TREE ANGEL’

‘IT’S NOT POSSIBLE! IT DEFIES THE LAWS OF PHYSICS!’

POWERFUL WEAPONS WITH WHICH TO FIGHT THE CORONAVIRUS

PERMISSIONS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

APPENDIX

PART ONE

1

‘HOW DO YOU KNOW IT’S HYPERTENSION?’

14th February 2013

The other day I had one of those nights. At around half past two in the morning I’d woken up, feeling my heart racing like Lewis Hamilton’s Formula One racing car and missing beats. Instantly, it dawned on me that I’d developed an irregular heartbeat. My heart sounds like an old car which has developed engine trouble, I thought, surprised I had managed to stay calm while at the same time I knew I was in terrible trouble. My heart beat so fast I thought I was going to die. The torture I’ve suffered every day for the last six months has triggered this. This is very serious… I’d better be careful. I moved slowly to the edge of my bed. God, what else is going to happen to me? I wondered anxiously as my feet touched the floor. Aware of my fear of doctors, I went downstairs to search for a medicine, thinking, I’m not going to see a doctor. I’ll sort this out by myself. Close to the stairs in his bedroom, Lathan was snoring away in bed. I thought, I won’t disturb him. Tensions often increase between us when I talk to him about my health, and the last thing I want now is more tension. Downstairs in the kitchen, I rummaged around a cupboard before I took a bottle of green tablets out of it. About fifteen minutes later, I was sitting on the edge of my bed, sipping a kind of tea, which I’d made with the green tablets I’d crushed with my pestle and mortar and hot water, thinking, this will have to do. I can’t find anything else for what ails me! Yuck, this is disgusting but it’s saving my life! This tastes like powdered beetles mixed with hot cabbage water. If I don’t die of a heart attack, the taste of this disgusting liquid will kill me! I hope I can find a better medicine than this soon! This is a temporary solution but it’ll have to do for now. People can die of an irregular heartbeat. But I’m not going to a doctor about it. I’m going to sort it out myself or die.

It was about the third week of March and I was in the kitchen at a quarter to one in the afternoon, contemplating suicide one moment, euthanasia the next, when I saw Lathan going over to wash his glasses under the tap. Leaning forward with a hand on a cupboard, I said, ‘I’m suffering from hypertension; the stress of my illnesses has put a tremendous strain on my heart.’

‘How do you know it’s hypertension? It might have been indigestion.’ He washed his glasses at the kitchen sink.

I took a plate out of a cupboard. ‘Because I can feel and hear my heart racing every day. And I’ve felt it missing beats. It feels like a Grand Prix racing car speeding through my chest before it misses beats. My father suffered from heart disease. He died of a massive heart attack at sixty-six! I could’ve died last night if I hadn’t taken my herbal beta blocker. You don’t seem to realize how ill I am!’

‘There’s no such thing as a herbal beta blocker!’ He dried his glasses with a sheet of kitchen roll.

‘Well, it might not be the same as the one you take but it calmed me down last night. It was like a powerful sedative which slowed down the rate at which my heart was beating,’ I answered quickly. ‘It’s used to treat hypertension. If I hadn’t taken it I could’ve died last night. My herbal medicine works! That’s all I care about. It saved my life! I know it’s only a temporary measure but for now it’s saving my life!’

One day in early April, I dashed to Lathan’s bedroom and resumed work on my book. Before leaving my bedroom, I thought long and hard about to whom I should leave my platinum wedding ring and my white gold and diamond engagement ring, should I die while the trial of Oscar Pistorius was still going on. I thought, I’ll leave my engagement ring to Bernie. She was very kind to me while I was running my greetings card business from our house of pink carpets in my thirties. When I had cash flow problems, she loaned me £750 and has never asked for that money back. I thought that was good of her. So, in my forties, I told her, if I get a book contract, she’d have some of my royalties and we left it at that. Then I thought, I must contact the pensions people to let them know that I want to leave my pension to Lathan.

Towards late spring, early summer, Lathan and I had another tense conversation about hypertension in the kitchen one afternoon, shortly before I went for my usual walk. ‘I had another hypertensive attack last night. My heart was racing. I could hear it missing beats,’ I said, hoping for some compassion. I felt like I was talking to a robot as he replied coldly, ‘You were probably suffering from indigestion!’ Anxious to make myself understood, I was feeling tongue tied when I blurted out: ‘I couldn’t possibly be suffering from indigestion because, when it happens, my stomach is empty! A top dermatologist diagnosed that I could feel dust mites at cellular level! So I can feel other things at cellular level. I can feel my heart racing in bed at night and missing beats! I can hear everything that’s going on beneath my chest as if I’ve got a built-in stethoscope! You can’t feel dust mites at cellular level but I can! So I know I’ve got an irregular heartbeat. And I’ve had a minor heart attack. I felt my heart muscle stiffening like a block of cement. I’ve felt a crushing pain in my left arm and jaw… and in the calves at the back of my legs. Ordinary heart tests can’t detect these things. That cuff method which your doctor used on you only detects a certain type of blood pressure. It’s primitive equipment. It doesn’t detect the blood pressure closer to the heart, and it can’t detect a slight stiffening of the heart muscle at cellular level, which is the level at which I can feel dust mites.’

2

‘DEAR NIECE ESME…’

Childhood for me was never normal. Anglo-Burmese, I grew up in Burma with my English mother, Burmese father, elder brother, Jacques, and younger sister, Tammy, during the 1960s, times when General Ne Win began to rule Burma with an iron fist. Under military rule Jacques and I became fluent in Burmese, English lessons and books having been banned by the government in 1965, when I was five. In contrast, our younger siblings, Tammy and Daniel who were born in 1965 and 1969, respectively, began their conventional primary school education in England during the 1970s at the age of five, more than a decade after Jacques was born.

More than twenty years before the military crackdown in 2007, I found out that Big Uncle had left Burma to take up his new desk job abroad, somewhere in Asia. A letter I received from him in 1981 at the age of twenty-one confirmed this – I guessed he had been sent to Coventry because he hadn’t toed the party line under Ne Win’s leadership. Depressed, fed up with my life in England and the low wages of a temporary secretary, I’d written to him out of desperation, asking for a job, under the illusion that he was still a rich and influential man who could pull a few strings for me. This is what Big Uncle wrote in his letter:

Dear niece Esme,

This is your uncle Colonel ******. I have received your letter about a week ago, my reply is late because I waited my daughters’ letter to you. They cannot speak and write English like you. I am also not used to writing in English grammatically.

You said in your letter that you left Rangoon 12 years ago, that means you left Burma at the age of nine. Jacques then would be about the age of ten. I remembered both Jacques and you crying madly while we were watching films in Rangoon theatres. Then when both of you could not be stopped crying your father had to carry both of you in his arms and had to get out of the theatre. It may be about half an hour when you stopped crying and your father and you two came in the theatre. That happened not once, almost every time we went to theatres. But it’s long long time ago.

Now you both are grownups. Maybe Jacques is a six footer or maybe not. I had seen your grandfather in person somewhere roundabout in 1969 at Hay Hampton. I had seen you both while it was already dark when I arrived at your house and you both were in bed already. Your grandfather seemed to me about six and a half foot tall, I may be wrong.

When you and Jacques were in Burma, we have already four children, when you have left we have another two, so altogether we now have six. The eldest is now about 29, he is married to my wife’s niece and they have three children already, two girls and one boy. The middle one is a boy. So I am very mature now because I have three grandchildren. My second child is a daughter, she is now 28 years. She had finished her graduation (major in mathematics) since 1978. After graduation she worked as an upper divisional clerk in an office of our Industry Ministry. But when I transferred to Indonesia she left her job and came along with us. She only sleeps and eats every day, free and easy at home.

My uncle then said, he had a son, 25 years. He went back to Burma in April this year. He is looking for a job. His three daughters had passed their matriculation and were living with him. One was about the same age as me, the others about 17 and 19 years.

We have sent a family photograph to your parents about a month ago. You have three other aunties who are my sisters. In fact you have another uncle who was my youngest brother but he died in 1979 just before we left Burma.

About a secretary job in the East! I am afraid, my dear niece, that the East should be the East. The East if mixed with the West would be like the life of your father, who laments for his home secretly and suffers loneliness in a country where there are his wife and children only, far away from deep friends and beloved relatives. And I also have in mind that the way Eastern countries keep secretaries is different from the way you keep them in your country. For example, I have no secretary in my office, whereas British Ambassador has his secretary in his office. If you can get a secretary post in a British Embassy elsewhere in the world, I think it could be a good position for you.

About the Royal Wedding on the 29th July, I do not want to give my comment. But to me the Royalties of the old age should be left alone. In this age of the world there should not have any Royalness in anything. Of course that’s my opinion, not yours.

Inflation and unemployment dominates every country in the world. Some countries suffer less, but most countries suffer worst. I think and do hope that inflation and unemployment effect less to our country. In trying to built up a just and prosperous country we must know how to do everything by ourselves. That is one of our policies – to be self-reliant.

Now my letter is very long and so I have to close it here. Best wishes to you and your parents & to Jacques, Tammy and Daniel. With love, your uncle.’

In the middle of this letter, Big Uncle mentioned the ‘intricacies’ of his job. ‘Normally we have two types of tasks; one is Policy tasks and the other is routine tasks…’ I thought he sounded more like a humble servant than a colonel in the army with a top government job, while he was telling me how a typical working day unfolded for him in his office. Only in my early twenties did I realize that the white mansion, which I thought he had owned since I first visited it as a child, was not actually his. It was a grace and favour home which he gave back to the government before he left Burma with his family soon after the former prime minister, U Nu, was deposed by General Ne Win.

In the following years I wondered, sometimes, what had happened to all my Burmese relatives after things I’d seen on the television about Burma made me remember fragments of my first nine years there. Feeling like an orphan, having remembered that I’d been estranged from most of my relatives for more than thirty years, especially after I left home at sixteen, I longed to have a normal family life. How did I end up as a recluse? I wondered. I remember. It all began in Burma.

3

‘DIDN’T YOUR TEACHERS SPEAK TO YOU?’

2005

‘How do I know you’re not an illegal immigrant?’ asked Vanessa angrily one summer’s day in an open-plan office, in front of all her staff.

Only on the day I was handing in my notice did I find out that Vanessa, the manageress of an employment agency, was not all that she seemed. Although I suspected I’d offended her when I had the gall to ask her, politely, to shred the faxes I’d sent her because identity theft was on the rise, what shocked me was my suddenly finding out now that she was a Jekyll and Hyde character. She had previously given me the impression that she liked me, especially when she was talking to me warmly about temping contracts, so I was confused by this sudden change in her attitude towards me. When I told her I was brought up in Burma as a child, she must’ve jumped to some strange conclusions about me, I thought, as I was taking the flak in front of her desk. Her staff, who seemed to be working in an atmosphere of fear and intimidation, were scowling at me while Vanessa raged: ‘I run this agency! I don’t need you telling me what to do!’ Although I was in agony and longed to sit down – my old ‘war wound’ had flared up, so I felt like my lower spine was on fire – I kept calm and talked only about identity theft, fraud, burglaries and giving up temping work because I didn’t want our quarrel to become too personal. Conscious that she must’ve had a grudge against me for some six or seven years, I wondered anxiously why Vanessa had not agreed to shred my banking details and faxes, which contained lots of personal information about me. Was she going to leave them out on a dustbin lid for all to see, unshredded, leaving me vulnerable to identity theft or fraud just to spite me? I thought, she’s going to. She can’t get angry with her clients who muck her about, so she’s taking her anger out on me. And she’s jealous because she hates her job and wants to stay at home and write a book like I’m going to do. She thinks I’m a lady of leisure and that annoys her. Nothing could be further from the truth. I’m in pain most of the time. That’s why I became a temp. In my late twenties and early thirties, I used to be a marketing manager before I became a temporary secretary, going in and out of jobs.

Aged forty-five, I was walking towards my car when I thought, I’m glad I’ll never have to work for her again. I had to stop temping because I developed another crippling condition. If she thought I was an illegal immigrant, why did she employ me? Why did she give me that certificate? Best temp of the month, it said! I drove home feeling as if a great weight had been taken off my shoulders, while at the back of my mind I was worrying about what Vanessa might do in an act of revenge. Mum’s English, I should have told her. I was born in England. I have a British passport. I have a right to be here. On the English side of my family there were peers of the realm, with seats in the House of Lords. They were wealthy and owned huge parts of England during the 1700s. My eyes fixed on the narrow country road ahead, I thought of my mother and my Asian father, and wondered how bad racial prejudice was in the Fifties. It’s ironical that Mum ended up being poor after she married Dad in England during the Fifties. He was a cadet at Sandhurst when she met him in London in her twenties. He was three years older than her. ‘Why don’t you leave him?’ I asked her in the kitchen after I’d watched my parents having an almighty row in the living room one day. ‘I’ve been with an Asian. Nobody would want me.’ My mother seemed to be on the verge of tears. ‘You can get another council house,’ I replied, surprised that she was not the tower of strength I had always imagined she was throughout my childhood. ‘I’ll get a job. I’ll support you. I won’t go to college.’ Halfway home, I was passing the Dick Wittington pub when I thought of Vanessa and how she had deceived me. ‘We don’t want someone like you without work. We’ll give you priority in the next booking,’ she gushed in a friendly way the last time she found me a job. Several days later she rang me again. ‘Hello, it’s Vanessa again. I’ve got a booking for you starting Monday. I think you’ll like it. It’s ongoing.’ Reflecting, I thought, she was a wolf in sheep’s clothing. She had me fooled for a long time.

I was nearly home when I remembered my childhood in Burma during the Sixties, and the bullying and ostracism I endured at school in England during the Seventies. It was ironical, I thought, that the same boys who bullied me at school started to give me wolf whistles when they saw me walking through a canteen towards the tea ladies at college at sixteen, my long hair in a ponytail, swinging to and fro like a pendulum. ‘Paki! Go back to the jungle!’ they kept shouting at me at school a year earlier over and over again, I recalled. ‘Er farver’s a Paki!’ Like wolves, they hunted me down in a pack when I was alone in the playground. They made my life a misery, those boys. That was one of the reasons why I hated going to school.

When I was about fifty-one, Lathan and I were reading newspapers quietly in the living room one evening, with the television on, when I learned something very odd about my childhood, something which was a bit of a revelation. This girl’s like me when I was nine, I thought. She’s a selective mute. Ten minutes later, we were talking in the kitchen. I was waiting for the kettle to boil when I began to confide some of my childhood secrets to Lathan for the first time in my life. There was something in his attitude which gave me confidence. Buoyed by this, I remembered that his past habit of telling me ‘I’ve heard it all before’ in his offhand way had left me feeling gagged throughout our marriage, while I was longing to share my secrets with him. As I spoke, I remembered that he had often dominated our conversations with talk of his grammar school and university education like an eloquent, self-pitying barrister, haunted as if by the notion that he had been deprived of a good education. The irony of all this was not lost on me when he groaned that he didn’t get to Oxford University, so that he could go on to qualify as a doctor. That had been his dream in his twenties, he confessed. To be fair to him he was caned once for laughing in class. Surprised that I had managed to get his attention, at last, I said, ‘I was a selective mute at the first primary school I went to in England in 1969. I didn’t talk for two years at school. That was shortly after we emigrated from Burma. I was like that at my comprehensive school as well. That’s how I became because I could hardly say a word of English when I started school in England at the age of nine. I couldn’t read the books my teacher kept giving to me, so I pretended to read them. A selective mute is someone who is too shy or anxious to speak to anyone other than close relatives, and possibly one friend, according to the Daily Express article I’ve just read, which is about a girl called Tamzen King. She was diagnosed as a selective mute at the age of twelve. I was like that when I was nine.’

‘Didn’t your teachers speak to you?’ asked Lathan.

‘No, not really.’ I was amazed he was encouraging me to talk about myself so unusually at last.

I was putting a tea bag in a mug when I remembered how he used to speak to me in the past. ‘Children in India have suffered worse than that…’ he remarked habitually in an offhand way. In those days I longed to say, but I haven’t told you anything about my childhood in Burma. You wouldn’t let me talk about it before. But nothing came out of my mouth, so he was none the wiser. ‘Well, at my comprehensive school my teacher called out my name during registration in the mornings but that’s all the conversation I had at school when my friend Phoebe wasn’t around,’ I continued. ‘She was like the Scarlet Pimpernel. The rest of the time I was a mute at school. I’m still a bit like that even now. That feeling hasn’t left me completely. That’s why I have problems talking to people like doctors and dentists. The trouble was that at my school in Burma there were no English lessons or books. And, by the time I started school in Rangoon, the teachers were banned from teaching English under the regime of General Ne Win. My school was run like a military academy. I saw my first book when I was somewhere between eight and nine but I couldn’t read it. Jacques and I were in the same boat. I don’t mean he was a mute…I mean he didn’t have English lessons in Burma, as far as I know. We were like two children who were educated in a shanty town in a Third World country without books and English lessons. But I was the odd one out in my family because I had problems nobody else had. I felt like an outsider in my own family.’

‘You were l’etranger.’ I felt comforted by his whimsical tones. Meanwhile, he opened the fridge and began to search eagerly for his next fix of sugar.

‘I was the only one in my family who suffered from travel sickness in the car. I used to tell my father to stop the car: I’m going to be sick. And I was the only child in my family who wet my bed in my teens. I remember seeing Daniel’s dry bed once and thinking, he doesn’t wet his bed and he’s only six. I’m fifteen. I shouldn’t be wetting my bed at my age! My blankets stank of urine. I was living in squalor in the filthiest corner of our council house on a wet, soggy mattress full of urine while the rest of my family slept on clean beds. I felt like a filthy rat, living in filth. And I was the one my father…I won’t talk about that. I became withdrawn anyway. At primary school in England, I was so shy I didn’t speak to anyone for two years after my teacher dragged my name out of me on my first day at school. I had confidence in Burma when I was playing with children on the streets of Rangoon but at primary school in England I lost my confidence and became too shy and anxious to talk. In the playground children kept ignoring me, I think because I seemed odd, quiet and withdrawn. So I was ostracized.’

‘You were an ostrich!’

He stood next to the fridge, pouring lots of maple syrup on some plain yoghurt. I was pouring hot water over a tea bag.

‘That was in 1969. That was the year Jacques and I began to live with our grandparents in a quaint English village called Hay Hampton. My parents disappeared then. I don’t know where they went to. That will always be a mystery. One minute I was with my mother, Jacques and Tammy on a BOAC aeroplane, bound for Heathrow Airport, and the next I was living with my English grandparents in their bungalow in Hay Hampton. My parents seemed to vanish in the Bermuda Triangle.’

4

DEMENTIA

When I realized I had developed dementia in January 2014, at fifty-three, I thought my world was coming to an end. I thought then, the menopause has done this to me. I’ll kill myself before I end up in an old people’s home with others like me. Studies done on mice or rats deprived of sleep for six weeks showed they developed dementia. I’ve hardly had a wink of sleep for one and a half years, so I’m not surprised I’ve got it.

‘What day is it?’ I kept asking Lathan in the kitchen at the start of this nightmare.

‘What day was it yesterday?’

He sounded awkward, obstinate, unhelpful to me.

‘If I knew that I wouldn’t be asking you, would I? All the days seem the same to me.’

During the days that followed, we had lots of very frustrating conversations like that every day, often in the kitchen. I panicked every time I forgot something. And I got frustrated when he questioned me like a policeman. I’m going mad, I kept thinking, as I felt the days merging together, so that I kept getting the ridiculous impression that every day was Monday. I’m losing my marbles! Nobody’s going to put me in an old people’s home! I’d rather be dead than end up somewhere like that! How long have I got left on this earth? On another day, I was in the kitchen when I had a vague idea I’d put some of (or all of) my important medicines on my chopping board. But when I looked at it a few seconds later, they had vanished and I didn’t know what I had done with them. I felt confused. What did I take? I wondered anxiously. Did I take my medicines? Have I taken my beta blocker? I can’t remember what I’ve done. Waves of panic surged over me as I wondered, time after time, if I’d put any of my medicines on my chopping board in the first place. Have I taken any of them? Have I cleaned my teeth? A few days or a few weeks later, I was washing dishes in the midst of my crisis when I thought, I keep forgetting what I’ve done. Frequent memory lapses occurred split seconds after I’d said something or done something, I noticed. My mind felt like a sieve when Lathan talked to me and I felt like I was going mad. What did you just say? I kept asking him. Often he got annoyed with me. ‘I’ve told you!’ he barked sternly, not for the first time. ‘I’m not telling you again! You should’ve listened!’ ‘I did!’ I protested. ‘But I forgot.’ Day after day, I was in the bathroom having a shower when I wondered, in a panic, did I just wash under my left arm? Did I wash under my right arm? I can’t remember. I’d better wash them again, just in case. Sometimes I ended up washing under both my arms two or three times, just to make sure I’d washed myself properly. Suddenly, I was anxious about everything. One windy day, I went to him in the living room. ‘I can’t remember if I’ve taken my antihistamine. I’ve got dementia! I could have an overdose if I take another one without realizing I’ve taken one already,’ I said. ‘Don’t take it, then,’ he spoke into a toilet roll before he looked up. ‘Well I won’t take one today.’ My resolve to kill myself grew stronger when I contemplated my bank account. How am I going to get my money if I can’t remember anything? I wondered as I imagined a bank clerk firing questions at me over the telephone, while I was stuttering at the end of the line, ‘I can’t remember. I can’t remember.’ Thoughts of my elusive PIN numbers and passwords terrified me. Sometimes I’d remember a word, a precious word I’d clung desperately to before it was snatched from me as if by the thought thief, just when I was on the verge of mentioning it in a conversation I was having with Lathan seconds later. One of those elusive words was ‘endocrinologist.’ ‘What’s that word?’ I kept asking him ponderously. ‘I keep remembering and forgetting it. That specialist who deals with hormones?’ Too often, it seemed to me, I went upstairs to get something, only to find myself walking through the dining room towards Lathan in a haze, saying, ‘I can’t remember what I went upstairs for. I wanted to get something but I can’t remember what it was. So I’ve come down again, empty handed.’ ‘It’ll come to you later. It happens to me sometimes,’ he responded casually. ‘But it’s happening to me all the time! That’s what’s so worrying about all this!’ Another thing which maddened me was my coordination, and a never-ending woolly, distressing, almost dizzying feeling of being muddled up. With this, there was some confusion about my right and left sides. Consequently, I almost poured the contents of my hot water bottle into the kitchen bin instead of the bucket – they were about a yard apart – not once but dozens of times. Just in case you wondered, dear reader, we have a cesspool, so we have to economize by collecting water in a bucket and pouring its contents on our garden. This has become a bit of a