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Listen » Gweneviere Mann and Yasir Salem
“I always have a notecard in my pocket that tells me what the date is.”
Gweneviere Mann talks to her boyfriend, Yasir Salem, about living without a short-term memory. Her condition results from a stroke she suffered during an operation to remove a brain tumor.
Recorded in New York, NY
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Listeners can track Gweneviere and Yasir's progress in the NYC Marathon on Sunday November 6, 2011.
Gweneviere: bib number 65445. Yasir: bib number 65444. Their start time is 10:40 AM.
To track them online, click here. Or through text messages, click here.
Credits
Produced by Michael Garofalo.
Facilitated by Tomas Rios.
Transcript
Click here to read the transcript for this story.
Interview transcript
Gweneviere Mann (GM): I always have a notecard in my pocket that tells me what the date is. And I have to write down when I eat meals because sometimes I might eat lunch three times because I don't remember that I ate already. The doctors say the brain can continue healing up to two years, but whatever is not back by that point is not likely to ever come back.
Yasir Salem (YS): So you had your surgery in November of 2008, right?
GM: Right, and so I'm going to have to live the rest of my life this way. And the thing that scares me the most is, like, the thought that I will wake up one day, and I'll be 80 years old and I won't remember the last 40 years of my life.
YS: Do you remember when you first came out of surgery?
GM: I know that I used to always think that I was in San Francisco.
YS: What are those things called, do you remember?
GM: Confabulations.
YS: Yeah.
GM: Yeah, do you remember another confabulation that I used to have?
YS: You used to think that your co-worker, Barbara, was your mom.
GM: [Laughs] Oh, that's right.
YS: Even though she's a completely different race than you.
GM: That’s funny, yeah.
YS: There was one point where you were confused 'cause you thought we had broken up, and I would ask you, like, "Why do you think you're staying at my place?" She's like, "Well, we're just cool like that."
GM: [Laughs] Yeah, Sorry about that.
YS: That's all right.
GM: And after all you'd been doing for me.
YS: Thankfully you got over that.
GM: I'm thankful for that as well.
YS: So, is there any positive things that have come out of losing your memory that you can look back on?
GM: Well, I ran the New York City Marathon with you, my boyfriend. And um, one of the things that I asked you was to help me--as a trick--to not let me look at any of the mile markers along the way. And if I asked you how long we'd been running to always tell me 10 or 15 minutes [laughs]. And it really worked like a charm. And when we got to the end, you and I were running across the finish line, and as if on cue I started crying my eyes out because I was so happy. You know, I have spent a lot of days since my injury comparing myself to what I used to be and, and feeling sad about the things that I've lost, but doing the marathon really shows me that I still have a lot left in me.
