Outsourcing Memory: Why My Memory is a Lie

Untitled (Granocyte) 2013
Untitled (Granocyte) 2013

I do not remember the exact moment when I began questioning my memory. And until recently, it was not the center of my practice. In the summer of 2012, I was hospitalized as part of the final phase of chemotherapy to treat the Hodgkin’s disease I had relapsed earlier in the year. I do not recall in great detail much of what happened. This had nothing to do my memory, instead this selective amnesia was brought upon by the mundane day-to-day life of lying in a bed. I could not tell you what I ate, or wasn’t eating. I could not tell you how much weight I lost, or about the weather on the other side of my window. I was caught in a routine. What I can recall, in great detail, was the shaking hands of the medical student doing work experience that could not find my pulse. I remember the bulging eyes of the senior nurse as she read 39.2 degrees from the thermometer. But most of all, I remember the furrowed eyebrows of the doctor with a pen to his lips who stood, bewildered because he could not tell me what the next few days would consist of. These gestures reminded me of an artist whom I had looked to for visual advice.

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