POWER
CHAPTER ONE
Meeting My Memory
The dreaded words came on January 14, 1999, my thirty-sixth birthday.
Scott, it’s cancer and it has spread. We need to do the surgery right away, today.
I had been praying that the biopsy Dr. James Thomas had done the day before would show that the little lump on my thyroid gland, discovered several weeks earlier during my first physical examination in eighteen years, was a benign nodule. Before the biopsy Dr. Thomas had told me that some people choose to go ahead and remove the entire thyroid during the biopsy procedure, but he wanted to avoid that if he could. A person can live very well without a thyroid, but the absence of the gland requires a lifetime regimen of drug therapy.
Now there was no choice. During the second surgery Dr. Thomas removed my thyroid as well as a suspicious lump in an adjacent lymph node. His skill spared me any damage to my vocal cords and the scar would be practically invisible.
A week later I was back in his office, where he inspected the incision and nodded approval at the rapid healing. But then his tone turned somber.
I believe we got it all,
he said. But the problem with this type of cancer is that it can come back. Even though we cleaned up everything we could find around your gland, it’s likely that small bits of thyroid tissue, some too small for us to retrieve, are still present. If so, there could be micro-tumors within the tissue that could come back. Studies indicate that there’s a 30 percent rate of return, but it’s up to you to decide if you want additional treatment. I can go ahead now and start you on Synthroid, the drug you’ll take for the rest of your life. But if you decide you want additional therapy, I need to delay the Synthroid to avoid drug interactions.
I wasn’t ready for this. I was just weaning myself from the pain medication, I felt terrible, and the last thing I wanted to do was research treatments and calculate odds, especially when I was gambling with my life. But my wife, Janet, was way ahead of me, as usual. She already had contacted Dr. Joseph Moore, an oncologist at Duke University Hospital who had worked with her father’s cancer for years. Dr. Moore was unequivocal: Take the additional treatment.
Since the initial discovery of the lump during my physical, I’d learned a lot about the thyroid gland. I had already known, of course, that it affected heart rate and metabolism and that people with thyroid problems often felt tired. But I learned that the effects of the thyroid hormone are far more extensive, affecting every cell in the body, facilitating all the physical and chemical processes that allow cell growth and maintain body functions. Most worrisome to me was that a lack of thyroxin often results in difficulty in focusing and concentrating and sometimes produces severe memory loss. But the doctors were reassuring: Once the right level of synthetic thyroxin is found by trial and error, those effects usually disappear.
The additional treatment would require about three weeks and they would be some of the most bizarre and traumatic of my life. Dr. Moore explained the process: We need to destroy any remnants of thyroid tissue. The thyroid gland naturally attracts iodine in your bloodstream. Therefore, you are going to swallow a solution of radioactive iodine that will seek and destroy thyroid tissue, kind of like a submarine mission in those old World War II movies. However, your body will become radioactive. Your progress will be measured with a Geiger counter and you’ll be confined to a lead-lined room for a couple of days. Although your body will rid itself of most of the radiation through your urine and sweat, you will still have trace amounts of the material in your body for up to three weeks. Whatever you bring into the lead-lined room stays in the room—books, papers, whatever. So don’t bring any laptops or other valuables.
Why?
I asked. If there are only going to be trace amounts in my sweat glands, what would it matter?
"That’s after the two days you’re inside the room. While you’re in the room you’ll be hot enough that people will have only limited contact with you and will wear badges to monitor radiation when they do. Anything you touch will be contaminated. You will be given a list of the protocols and all your questions will be answered, so be sure to write them all down so you don’t forget."
Thankfully, he winked when he said that.
I felt well enough to go to the local bookstore to browse through books about the brain and how it works. I wanted to see if there was anything proactive I could do to mitigate the loss of memory and other cognitive skills. One of the many books I thumbed through was Use Your Perfect Memory, by Tony Buzan. The jacket copy described Buzan as one of the world’s leading authorities on the brain and learning techniques.
One passage particularly caught my attention:
I remember at least three students during my undergraduate years who knew more about certain subjects than practically everyone else in our classes and who consequently used to give private tutoring and coaching to those who were struggling. Extraordinarily, these bright students would regularly fail to excel at examination time, invariably complaining that they had not had enough time in the examination room to gather together the mass of knowledge that they had and that for some reason they ‘forgot’ at critical moments.
That’s just like me, I thought. I studied hard in school but often did poorly on tests.
Then I read an exercise that Buzan had developed using a deck of cards to improve your memory. I didn’t fully understand how it worked, but I knew I would soon have plenty of time on my hands and taking a cheap deck of cards into the lead-lined room was no big loss. I bought the book.
My session in the lead room was scheduled for three weeks later. As I waited to begin the therapy, my life slowly descended into a surreal, sluggish world. Deprived of my thyroid gland’s steady supply of thyroxin, I found that everything became much more difficult. Most people read for relaxation. I became physically and mentally exhausted after reading just a few pages, and nothing stuck in my memory. I simply couldn’t make sense of what I read. And my verbal skills suffered just as badly. If someone asked me a question, I would start to answer, then completely lose my train of thought. I often wondered if this was what Alzheimer’s was like—aware one moment and not the next.
On February 19, 1999, I took my first full dose of radioactive medicine to destroy the remnants of cancer floating inside my throat. The hospital room seemed ordinary enough except for the door. It looked like the entrance to a bank vault. A nurse brought me the radioactive iodine solution in what looked like a Stone Age soup can, the kind Fred Flintstone might use, chiseled out of rock and heavy as hell. Janet had just left the room. Inside the heavy can was a small vial of what looked like clear water. I was relieved that it wasn’t glowing. As instructed, I drank it, then washed it down with several cups of water. It tasted warm and bland. I wondered if the warmth had anything to do with its nuclear nature.
As the nurse left, the closing door thudded with the heaviness of a stone being rolled against a tomb. Oddly, the deafening silence suddenly reminded me of my first and only piano recital. The clarity of that memory was surprisingly perfect. It was as if I had been transported back in time.
My recital piece, Skater’s Waltz
—a very streamlined adaptation of the classic composition—was designed to demonstrate what meager skills I had developed as a reluctant pianist. I had spent countless hours banging away on our family piano in the living room, memorizing the string of notes. On the dreaded day of the recital, the small gathering of proud parents and obligated siblings might as well have been a crowd of thousands. The dozen or so student performers were sequestered in a small room offstage, a breeding ground of nervous anticipation that grew into primal fear. My hands and legs were shaking. The applause awarded to the younger students did nothing to calm me. My hands and legs would not stop shaking. Strangely, my mind filled with images of the joys of speeding down wet streets on my bike, then slamming on the brakes and sliding to a stop. Would my fingers slip off the piano keys as easily as my bicycle tires slipped on wet pavement?
Finally, the moment arrived. My teacher introduced me. For a moment I stood stock-still, unable to leave the anonymous safety of backstage. Then I stumbled toward the baby grand piano. I didn’t look at the audience but kept my gaze fixed on the black and white keys. Surely they would restore my depleted confidence and drain the trembling from my hands. I thought I had become good friends with those eighty-eight keys during the months of practicing. But the moment I placed my fingers in the beginning position, they betrayed me. I realized that I had never played on this particular piano before. I froze. The keys somehow seemed longer and more elegant, with a kind of majestic shine that was different from the upright piano at home. It felt different. I was paralyzed. The silence was smothering, like an invisible blanket of fog that reduced my vision to the taunting keys in front of me. Everything else blurred into a haze that quickly penetrated my brain and erased Skater’s Waltz
from my mind.
I don’t know how long I sat there. Then came the voice of my best friend’s mother, Jean-Ann Livesay: You can do it, Scotty!
Those wonderful words that broke the silence in the room also broke the frozen grip of fear on my body. But the result was no better. I stood up, turned to the expectant audience, and mumbled, Ladies and gentlemen, I forgot my piece.
I slunk off the stage, desperate for the solace of the green room, only to find that the other students were taking especially malevolent delight in my failed performance. I never took another piano lesson.
This memory flashed across my mind in the instant the lead door closed. I could almost feel the piano keys as I looked at my fingers and thought about my sweaty hands. In a moment of black humor, I wanted to will myself back in time and play Skater’s Waltz,
contaminating those traitorous keys with radioactive sweat.
That’s when it hit me: I could remember the past with virtually perfect clarity! I might not be able to concentrate in the present, but clearly my long-term memory was functioning perfectly. The speed and detail of my piano-recital recollection was staggering given my state of mental sluggishness. No effort had been required to retrieve the information. It had come automatically.
Suddenly, some of the things Tony Buzan described in his book began to make sense. I had never thought about this before. In order to unlock the secret of remembering a deck of cards with lightning speed, I needed to discover how I naturally collected and stored memories.
Cancer is always a life-altering event, for better or worse, for its victims. That dreaded phone call on my thirty-sixth birthday signaled the beginning of a journey that would take me to the lowest point of my mental and physical life. And although the cancer destroyed my thyroid gland, it also opened the door to an appreciation of the reliability, necessity, and accuracy of human memory. This book is about what I learned on that extraordinary journey and how you can apply it to improve your own memory.
The Bad Memory Poster Child
Many of us go through life convinced that we don’t have a very good memory. How many times have you heard this comment or something like it: Honey, have you seen the car keys? I don’t remember where I put them.
And how many times have you run into that neighbor in the grocery store and for the life of you couldn’t remember her name? Have you ever thought you’re subject to any of the following conditions?
I have difficulty comprehending.
I have a short attention span.
I’m terrible with names.
I’m easily bored.
I do poorly on tests.
Don’t worry: We’ve all felt at least a few of those notions. The proliferation over the past decade of Post-it notes and over the last few years of Palm Pilots attest to our attempt to get things done that we fear we will otherwise forget. Bill Cosby, the comedian, likes to describe his Memory Is in the Butt Theory.
He sometimes walks into a room and forgets why he’s there. When that happens, he retreats to the room he just left, sits down, and then usually he remembers what he wanted to do in that other room.
Those of us who are around young children often notice how they have only to see or hear things once to be able to stow that information away in their minds. We marvel at the power of young minds being formed and are reminded at the same time that we aren’t getting any younger. We unconsciously conclude that memory is a transient gift for the young, which erodes as we age.
When I was young I could have qualified as the poster boy for bad memory. Going to school in the 1970s in the foothills of Tennessee near the Great Smoky Mountains, I thought that memory
was just a convenient way to describe the boring, rote repetition of facts or figures that eventually dug a trench in my brain like the grooves of the ancient 33 rpm records that my third-grade teacher made me use to learn my multiplication tables. I can still hear the sound of that monotone female voice droning over and over: Three times two is six, three times three is nine, three times four is twelve.
Much of school seemed geared toward relentless repetition. Learning to write involved hours and hours of practice repeating letters again and again until they were perfect. Even more advanced subjects like algebra and geometry involved working the same kinds of problems over and over again until a mind-numbing pattern formed in my head
I did manage to learn some mnemonic tricks that helped a little. The acronym HOMES allowed me to whip off the names of the Great Lakes easily: Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior. In science class I managed to recall the organization of living things with the sentence King Philip Came Over For Good Spaghetti (Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species). The planets orbiting the sun were identified by this carefully crafted sentence: My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto).
Often, though, my little tricks didn’t stand up to the rigors of exams. My memory had an annoying habit of blanking under the stress of a test. Did my very educated mother order pizzas or spaghetti? Like an Etch A Sketch drawing that disappears when shaken, my ability to recall information seemed to dissipate after being jarred by the first few questions. As a result, I didn’t perform well in class and, compared to my friends, I felt stupid. That belief was reinforced when I graduated low in my high school class and my SATs were just above the minimum needed to be accepted into the University of Tennessee.
College was even worse than high school, especially since I chose to study engineering. And not just any engineering, but chemical engineering, arguably one of the most difficult undergraduate degrees to obtain. I’d like to say I chose that major because I recognized my scholastic shortcomings and believed that such a difficult degree would provide the challenge I needed to unlock my mental potential. But other reasons were at work. Partly, it was peer pressure. I thought that if I chose a tough degree, that would somehow make up for my lack of great grades and I could still be included in the group.
But the main reason I chose it was that my father is an engineer and I didn’t want to disappoint him by pursuing some other degree. Of course I recognize the near insanity of that decision today. In high school, my worst grades were in chemistry and I hated it. Maybe it was some kind of teenage madness, that transient affliction of virtually all people between the ages of thirteen and nineteen that makes them believe they are invincible. That state of mind lives for the thrill of the moment—"Dad, I’ve decided to
