It’s becoming clear my faculties are fading fast

EVERYTHING is going. All my faculties. As I write this I’m pinning my nose up to the computer screen in a valiant attempt to correct any typos. Problem is I can barely see the screen. My eyesight is becoming decidedly compromised.

I play Scrabble online and there’s a ‘chat’ facility for us to say well done to each other or lament the fact that we have vile letters or, indeed, it’s also a platform for weirdos to try to engage their fantasies. I sent a message to a guy that I was playing with the other day saying “I’ve no bowels”. Now clearly I meant vowels but he came back with “you must be in a terrible state, I don’t envy you”. The positive in all of this is that I can’t see the dirt in the house. Everybody else can but I can’t.

I told my son the other day that the roof was ‘gone’. “Jesus, Mum, what do you actually mean by gone. I mean your legs are gone, your eyes are gone, your hearing is gone, your brain is gone. There’s a different thing every day. What does ‘gone’ actually mean?” He thinks I’m exaggerating. I’m not. Everything is gone, including the roof.

My hearing has been bad for years, I have often taken off my sunglasses and said “I can’t hear with those things on”. People have looked at me in amazement. But I now realise I’m half hearing and half lip reading. A friend was talking to me about her mother the other day and her mother does have hearing aids. “My mother’s dog has to get a hearing aid,” she said. Good God, I thought, I know she adores that dog but that’s a step too far. Turns out she said “My mother’s dog ate the hearing aid”.

I may have been misunderstanding people for years.