Marlene brought me her appointment book instead of her brown bag last Tuesday. She had written her own name in it three times on the same page, in three different spellings. She set it down on the table at the senior centre on Elm Street and asked me straight out whether this was the kind of thing you call a doctor about.
I gave her the same advice I give anyone who asks. The calling is rarely the hard part. The knowing when is.
The Notebook by the Phone
Before you call anyone, write things down. What slipped, when, and what else was happening. Not because the doctor needs paperwork, but because memory about memory is unreliable. I keep my own notes next to the paper calendar, and some weeks the page is empty, which is also information.
Here is what it cost me to get a proper picture of my own forgetting, and I did this badly the first time. The notebook was inexpensive. The blood-pressure cuff check, free, because I already owned the cuff. The medication review with my own pharmacist, nothing, though it took two trips because I forgot half the bottles. Call it a modest sum and several months, most of it spent on my own stubbornness.
People think the doctor’s visit is a verdict. You go in, they test you, they tell you what you have. What actually happens, in my experience, is a conversation about your list. The doctor asks when it started. You say you don’t remember, which is funny and also the point. They ask about sleep, about the pills in the brown bag, about whether you can still manage the things you managed last year. It is less like a diagnosis and more like sorting buttons.
At first I only wrote down the big slips. You lose the name and find it at midnight. You forget why you walked into the kitchen but you remember you walked in for a reason. That is one kind. The other kind, the kind worth calling about, does not come back at midnight, and it starts to interfere with the day itself.
Take Carol, who called me in March of last year because she had missed her own dentist appointment. One missed appointment is nothing. But she had also missed one in January, and forgotten a birthday she has never once forgotten in sixty years, and when we counted together on the phone, that was three things in ten weeks, each one a thing she used to hold easily. She called her doctor sometime in mid-March. The appointment was, I believe, the second of April. That is the pace of it. Not an emergency. A list, a call, a look.
How to keep your memory steadyThe video explains the cause of memory slips, and how to get your memory back.
So watch the detailed memory video before you change anything in the medicine cabinet or the daily routine.
Marlene spelled her own name three ways, and I never did find out which one she thinks is right.