An Absent Mind(7)

“What’s my name?” he asked. I explained that I didn’t want to be rude, but I meet so many people. He nodded and smiled again.

The doctor then asked me to count backward from one hundred by sevens.

“Ninety-three,” I said quickly. Ninety-three minus seven? I thought for a minute about that one as I closed my eyes. “Eighty-six,” I ventured. He nodded his head. Now I was on a roll. Eighty-six minus seven? I closed my eyes again, but it just wouldn’t come. I figured I might as well guess. “Seventy-something … seventy-five?” I finally mumbled. He said something about my doing fine and that I could stop. I protested that I could get the next one right, but my mind went blank.

Then he held up some pictures of things and asked me what they were. The first two were easy, a flower and a house. I missed the next one, which he told me was a volcano, and I missed the one after that. Actually, I knew it, but I just couldn’t find the word. He said it was a funnel. After a few more pictures, some of which I identified, he gave me a piece of paper with some lines on it. It kind of looked like a house. He asked me to draw it. I did the best I could, but I knew it wasn’t very good. I told him I’d never been very artistic.

Then he gave me another piece of paper with a circle and the number twelve at the top. He told me to fill in the other numbers of the clock and make the hands show ten to eleven. It didn’t look like a clock then, or after I’d scribbled on it.

After that, he had me walk across the room in some funny way. I did what he said and I did it well, because I saw him put a check mark in a box on his sheet. Then he pulled some tubes out of a drawer and asked me to sniff them and tell him what they smelled like. Some of them didn’t smell at all, I told him. He put an x, not a check mark, this time.

The doctor turned to me and asked me my birth date. By now I was tired, but I really wanted to show him I knew it. “February,” I said. “February the tenth.”

Monique nodded like I was right. Well, of course I was right. Everyone knows their birthday.

“What year?” he asked.

My face flushed. After a moment, I shook my head and told him I wasn’t quite sure.

Then the doctor wanted to know if I remembered what we first talked about when we arrived at his office.

“What do you mean?” I said.

He asked me to describe our earlier conversation. I told him I remembered some of it. “Good,” he replied. “Tell me.”

It seemed like he had rattled off so many things so quickly. They all blurred into something in my brain that I couldn’t make out. I was having trouble even getting the words out—and to be frank, I wasn’t sure which words I wanted to come out. He stood there in front of me, leaning back against his desk, patiently waiting for my response. I glanced over at Monique. Her mascara was running.





Monique





Confirmation


I guess I already knew it. But when a man in a white coat with more diplomas on his wall than there are flowers on my bedroom wallpaper confirmed Dr. Horowitz’s diagnosis that Saul has Alzheimer’s, it felt like they might as well have been closing the lid of his coffin.

Saul kept glancing over at me for help when he didn’t know the answers to Dr. Tremblay’s questions. I looked over at his stooped shoulders and tired face. This was not the man I married. Not the man whose booming voice frightened those around him. Not the man who was so tough on the children. All of that is gone. Now he seems more like my child than my husband. But I don’t need another child. I need a husband.

I could tell he was embarrassed. I wanted to help him with the answers, if only to preserve his dignity. That is one of the few things he has left, but Alzheimer’s will rob him of that soon enough.

After the examination, Dr. Tremblay asked Saul to wait in the anteroom so he could talk to me. Saul didn’t budge. My first thought was that he was just being stubborn, not one of his best traits. Then I realized that he didn’t understand the doctor’s request. The same way he didn’t understand when the doctor had pulled a piece of paper out of his drawer and held it up. The words Close your eyes were printed on it in block letters. Saul looked at the paper as if it were blank. Finally, the doctor asked him if he knew what it meant. Saul said yes, but he continued to stare straight ahead. The doctor glanced over at me with a reassuring look and put the paper back in its place.

Dr. Tremblay stood up and asked Saul to go outside with him. Saul looked over at me. I nodded. Then the doctor followed him out to the waiting room, returning alone a few moments later.

He cleared his throat—not once, but twice—and then stated Saul had Alzheimer’s and that it was still in what he called the early to moderate stage. He said there might be good days, when Saul was more or less lucid, others when he would appear to be lucid but drift off, and just plain bad days.

“The bottom line,” he explained, “is that it may sometimes be hard for you to understand where Saul is in this quickly changing landscape.” Those were his exact words.

He said it wouldn’t be too long until it got worse. I asked him what that meant. He cleared his throat again and told me that Saul had anomia. He said that meant when Saul couldn’t find the word he wanted, he would describe characteristics of the word––like calling a toothbrush a tooth cleaner, or a key a door opener.