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Blood pressure, sugar, heart and brain
Most of what worries us about memory after sixty starts in the plumbing, not the filing. The Cuff in the Hall Drawer I keep a blood-pressure cuff in the drawer by the front door, next to the tape measure and the spare light bulbs. It is not there for emergencies. It is there because pressure…
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Doctor visits for memory after sixty
Thirty-one. That was the parking garage amount my neighbour Lenore paid last spring to sit in a waiting room for three hours and be told, in seven minutes, that her bloodwork was “within normal limits.” She never got to mention the sleep aid. She never got to mention the cat that had started waking her…
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Ordinary forgetting at sixty
Last Tuesday I stood in the hallway with my reading glasses in my hand, looking for my reading glasses. Walt found them. He said nothing, which is worse than saying something. He just handed me a grape from the bowl on the counter and went back to his chair. Why memory slips after sixtyThe video…
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Everyday memory tools after sixty
I have a confession to start, because I believe in beginning honest. Last March I stood in my own kitchen with the blood-pressure cuff in my hand and could not remember where the hall drawer was. My own hall. My own drawer. I had put the cuff away in that drawer for four years. Walt…
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Sleep, Hearing and Sight After Sixty
A lot of people believe that once you pass sixty, poor sleep and dimmer hearing and weaker eyes are just the body winding down, all three on the same slide, nothing to be done. I heard it at the pharmacy counter for thirty-two years and I hear it at the senior centre now. It sounds…
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Medicines and Memory at Sixty
A woman at the senior centre on Elm Street leaned over the sign-in sheet last month and asked me, low, so the others wouldn’t hear: “Is it the pills, or is it me?” She had driven herself there. She runs the rummage event. She is sixty-two and she had forgotten the name of her own…