Here’s the deal – Ginkgo Biloba is an herbal supplement that is supposed to help you enhance your memory. Over the past year or two I’ve been feeling like my memory is slipping. The irony here is that I bought a bottle of ginkgo biloba in order to increase my capacity to remember things and yet I keep forgetting to take it. It’s a vicious cycle.

My reason for wanting to take an herbal supplement to help with my memory is personally pretty frightening. I feel like I’m forgetting things far too often and my focus is almost completely gone. I used to think that I was pretty sharp and that my powers of recall were vast and immeasurable. These days I sometimes feel like I’m in a fog and that I’m bound to forget something important or even simple tasks that I’ve done during the day. I literally feel like I’m seeing the world through a gauze bandage; my mind is having problems recalling people, places and things.

This whole thing kind of has me freaked out.

I didn’t think that it was going to be a big deal and that it really wouldn’t interfere with my day-to-day life. That was until yesterday happened. On Monday I got a call to come in for an interview downtown. While they were trying to schedule me they made the off the cuff remark ‘can you come in today?’ and I immediately said, ‘sure!’. So they scheduled me to come in 2 hours after they called me. No time to get myself together, no time to prep myself. It was pretty much like going into an audition and performing a cold read. I really should have thought this one out.

The interview itself was an hour and a half of discussion followed by what was described as an acid test: answer a number of questions on a computer as well as build what they directed me to build. This was a mix of HTML, CSS and javascript and it was absolutely one of the worst times for my memory to begin to fail me or become clouded. It was absolutely horrible – I could see bits of code and formats but it was like looking at a mirage in the desert. Amorphous, partially formed and akin to grasping at a ladder made of smoke. I did the best that i could but it wasn’t until a few hours after that I realized that I could have answered things differently or that my syntax was wonky. Nothing is worse than being able to see javascript syntax and knowing what it does but not being able to describe how you want to convert something to either hex or an octal.

I wanted to smack my head against a wall.

It’s at this point that I can only think that the reason why I’m having these mental issues are because I’ve been on Lipitor. I raised the issue with my health care provider a few months ago but I don’t think that she thought much of it. It is the only part of my life that has altered my chemical make up and the timing of my fuzzy thinking coincides with being dosed with Lipitor.

I don’t like this feeling. Nope. Don’t like it at all. I’m 41. I shouldn’t feel like I’m beginning to suffer from Alzheimers. This is especially true after I got curious and started researching whether has ever happened with this statin and then I began reading horror stories, such as the former astronaut who woke up one day and his wife found him wandering around their driveway unable to recognize her.

Listen, physical pain I can take in spades. At least it’s something fairly tangible. Mental things scare the living heebie-jeebies out of me.