Memory overload

I hope ope you all had a nice break over Easter. I certainly hope it was better than mine. Foolishly, I fell ill.

It began with a bit of a runny nose and I thought it was nothing. Then I started running a temperature and I just could not catch my breath. By the third day, I felt like death with a hangover. Reluctantly, I dragged myself to the doctor’s while my family painted crosses on the front door. I thought it was a bad case of pneumonia. I was wrong. It was much worse than that – it was Mnemonia.

Mnemonia is a strange and curious disease. Medical students are at an increased risk of contracting it but it can affect anyone with a lot to learn and limited neural space. There is usually a spike around this time of year when revising students are frantically packing their minds with odd phrases and silly ditties far faster than is considered safe, or normal. Occasionally, it has proved fatal.

When most people get a chest infection, they complain of a hacking cough. I instead developed an acronym cough. Every five minutes, I would splutter out anything from AIDS to Y2K. At times, I was horribly, horribly infectious – other times, I was just an annoying computer glitch.

This was a minor inconvenience. My main complaint was my inability to speak in anything other than catchy mnemonics. It started out innocuous enough; when asked what I wanted to eat, responding with, “My Very Early Morning Jam Sandwich Usually Needs Pepper,” earned me a slightly eclectic but still edible breakfast.

However, when I was stopped for direction by some tourists, they took my reply, “Some Lovers Try Positions That They Can’t Handle,” as a rather personal slur against them, rather than a way of remembering the bones of the wrist. I could see they were getting angry so I tried to explain. “Oh, Oh, Oh, To Touch And Feel Virgin Girls’ Vaginas. Such Heaven,” also fell foul. To cut a long story short, a rare sequela of Mnemonia is an increased risk of black eyes.

This saw me journey to A&E. Staffed by doctors, the matured form of the medical student, I thought someone might understand my plight. After all, this was one of those quirky, fine-print diseases you only ever read about in books. My giddy anticipation unfortunately made my mouth run. “Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain! Every Good Boy Deserves a Favour! Bad Beer Rots Our Young Guts But Vodka Goes Well!”

Naturally, they thought I was either drunk or mad or both, as any sane person might reason. They promptly gave me a cold shower, a sprinkling of electro-convulsive therapy and fumigated my uterus, just for good measure. This failed to treat the Mnemonia but I was much more careful about speaking now, so they deemed me cured.

In the past, sufferers of Mnemonia were cast out from society, left to wander in the wilderness. They were checked occasionally to see if they were spouting any particularly relevant prophecies – you would be surprised at the number of doomsdays we have avoided thanks to the Mnemonites.

But this is the twenty-first century – we have journeyed far from those days of superstition and orthopaedic surgery. My problem was that I was bursting with too many mnemonics – my brainstem was being strangled by aides-mémoire. Somehow, I had to get the excess mnemonics off and out of my frontal cortex. One last mnemonic came to mind. Kiss – Keep It Simple, Stupid.

So I self-medicated by hitting my head against a brick wall until all the dangerous knowledge came out and I felt empty again. The ironic thing was this was very similar to how I felt before I started learning those damn mnemonics to start with.