Текст книги "Still Alice"

Автор книги: Lisa Genova

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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 16 страниц)

As she sat to pee, she saw the blood. Her period. Of course, she understood that menstruation at the beginning of menopause was often irregular, that it didn’t always disappear all at once. But the possibility that she wasn’t actually in menopause snuck in, grabbed on tight, and wouldn’t let go.

Her resolve, softened by the champagne and blood, caved in on her completely. She started crying, hard. She was having trouble taking in enough air. She was fifty years old, and she felt like she might be losing her mind.

Someone knocked on the door.

“Mom?” asked Anna. “Are you okay?”

NOVEMBER 2003

Dr. Tamara Moyer’s office was located on the third floor of a five-story professional office building a few blocks west of Harvard Square, not far from where Alice had momentarily lost herself. The waiting and examining rooms, still decorated with framed Ansel Adams prints and pharmaceutical advertisement posters on the high-school-locker-gray walls, held no negative associations for her. In the twenty-two years that Dr. Moyer had been Alice’s physician, she’d only ever been to see her for preventative checkups—physical exams, immunization boosters, and more recently, mammograms.

“What brings you here today, Alice?” asked Dr. Moyer.

“I’m having a lot of memory problems lately that I’ve been attributing to symptoms of menopause. I stopped getting my period about six months ago, but it came back last month, so maybe I’m not in menopause, and then, well, I thought I should come in and see you.”

“What are the specific kinds of things that you’re forgetting?” Dr. Moyer asked while writing and without looking up.

“Names, words in conversation, where I put my BlackBerry, why something is on my to-do list.”

“Okay.”

Alice watched her doctor closely. Her confession didn’t seem to grab her in any way. Dr. Moyer received the information like a priest listening to a teenage boy’s admission of impure thoughts about a girl. She probably heard this type of complaint from perfectly healthy people countless times a day. Alice almost apologized for being so alarmist, silly even, for wasting her doctor’s time. Everyone forgot these sorts of things, especially as they got older. Add menopause and that she was always doing three things at once and thinking of twelve, and these kinds of memory lapses suddenly seemed small, ordinary, harmless, and even reasonably expected. Everyone’s stressed. Everyone’s tired. Everyone forgets things.

“I also became disoriented in Harvard Square. I didn’t know where I was for at least a couple of minutes before it all came back to me.”

Dr. Moyer ceased documenting symptoms on her evaluation sheet and looked directly at Alice. That grabbed her.

“Did you have any tightness in your chest?”

“No.”

“Did you have any numbness or tingling?”

“No.”

“Did you have a headache or were you dizzy?”

“No.”

“Did you notice any heart palpitations?”

“My heart was pounding, but that was after I became confused, more like an adrenaline response to being scared. I remember feeling great, actually, just before it happened.”

“Did anything else unusual happen that day?”

“No, I’d just come home from Los Angeles.”

“Are you having any hot flashes?”

“No. Well, I felt what could’ve been one while I was disoriented, but again, I think I was just scared.”

“Okay. How are you sleeping?”

“Fine.”

“How many hours are you getting each night?”

“Five to six.”

“Is this a change from what it’s been in the past?”

“No.”

“Any difficulty falling asleep?”

“No.”

“How many times do you typically wake up during the night?”

“I don’t think I do.”

“Do you go to bed at the same time every night?”

“Usually. Except when I travel, which has been a lot lately.”

“Where have you traveled?”

“In the last few months, California, Italy, New Orleans, Florida, New Jersey.”

“Were you sick after any of these trips? Any fevers?”

“No.”

“Are you taking any medications, anything for allergies, supplements, anything that you might not normally think of as a medicine?”

“Just a multivitamin.”

“Any heartburn?”

“No.”

“Any weight changes?”

“No.”

“Any bleeding in your urine or bowel movements?”

“No.”

She asked each question rapidly on the heels of each answer, and the topics jumped from one to the next before Alice had time to follow the reasoning behind them. As if she were riding a roller coaster with her eyes shut, she couldn’t predict which way she was being turned next.

“Are you feeling more anxious or stressed than typical?”

“Just about not being able to remember things. Otherwise, no.”

“How are things with your husband?”

“Fine.”

“Do you think your mood is pretty good?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think you could be depressed?”

“No.”

Alice knew depression. Following the deaths of her mother and sister when she was eighteen, she’d lost her appetite, she’d been unable to sleep for more than a couple of hours at a time despite being endlessly tired, and she’d lost an interest in enjoying anything. It had lasted a little over a year, and she’d never experienced anything like it since. This was entirely different. This wasn’t a job for Prozac.

“Do you drink alcohol?”

“Just socially.”

“How much?”

“One or two glasses of wine with dinner, maybe a little more on a special occasion.”

“Any drug use?”

“No.”

Dr. Moyer looked at her, thinking. She tapped her pen on her notes as she read them. Alice suspected the answer wasn’t anywhere on that piece of paper.

“So am I in menopause?” she asked as she gripped her parchment-papered seat with both hands.

“Yes. We can run an FSH, but everything you tell me is completely consistent with menopause. The average age of onset is forty-eight to fifty-two, so you’re right in there. You may continue to get a couple of periods a year for a while. That’s perfectly normal.”

“Can estrogen replacement help with the memory problems?”

“We don’t put women on estrogen replacement anymore, unless they’re having sleep disturbances, really awful hot flashes, or they’re already osteoporotic. I don’t think your memory problems are due to menopause.”

The blood rushed from Alice’s head. Precisely the words she’d dreaded and only recently dared to consider. With that one, professionally uttered opinion, her tidy and safe explanation shattered. Something was wrong with her, and she wasn’t sure that she was ready to hear what it was. She fought the impulses growing louder inside her, begging her to either lie down or get the hell out of that examining room immediately.

“Why not?”

“The symptoms of memory disturbances and disorientation listed for menopause are secondary to poor sleep hygiene. Those women aren’t coping well cognitively because they aren’t sleeping. It’s possible that you’re not sleeping as well as you think you are. Perhaps your schedule and jet lag are taking a toll, perhaps you’re worrying about things throughout the night.”

Alice thought about the times she’d suffered from fuzzy thinking caused by bouts of sleep deprivation. She certainly hadn’t played at the top of her mental game during the last weeks of each pregnancy, following the birth of each child, and at times, when she was up against a grant deadline. In none of those circumstances, however, did she get lost in Harvard Square.

“Maybe. Could I suddenly need more sleep because I’m older or because I’m in menopause?”

“No. I don’t usually see that.”

“If it’s not lack of sleep, what are you thinking?” she asked, the clarity and confidence now completely absent from her voice.

“Well, I’m concerned about the disorientation in particular. I don’t think it was a vascular event. I think we should do some tests. I’m going to send you for blood work, a mammogram, and bone density because it’s time, and a brain MRI.”

A brain tumor. She hadn’t even considered that. A new predator loomed in her imagination, and she felt the ingredients of panic once again brewing in her gut.

“If you don’t think it was a stroke, what are you looking for in the MRI?”

“It’s always good to definitively rule these things out. Make the appointment for the MRI and then one to see me right after, and we’ll go over everything.”

Dr. Moyer had avoided answering the question directly, but Alice didn’t push her to reveal her suspicions. And Alice didn’t share her tumor theory. They would both just have to wait and see.

WILLIAM JAMES HALL HOUSED THE departments of psychology, sociology, and social anthropology and was located just beyond the gates of Harvard Yard on Kirkland Street, a region referred to by students as Siberia. Geography, however, was not the most prominent factor that alienated it from the main campus. William James Hall could never be mistaken for any of the stately, classically collegiate structures that adorned the prestigious Yard and housed the freshman dormitories and classes in mathematics, history, and English. It could, however, be mistaken for a parking garage. It possessed no Doric or Corinthian columns, no red brick, no Tiffany stained glass, no spires, no grand atrium, no physical detail whatsoever that might obviously or subtly affiliate it with its parent institution. It was a 210-foot, unimaginative beige block, quite possibly the inspiration for B. F. Skinner’s box. Not surprisingly, it had never been featured in the student walking tour or the Harvard calendar, spring, summer, winter, or fall.

Although the view of William James Hall was inarguably abysmal, the view from it, in particular from many of the offices and conference rooms on the upper floors, was nothing short of splendid. As Alice drank her tea at her desk in her office on the tenth floor, she relaxed in the beauty of the Charles River and Boston’s Back Bay framed before her by the enormous southeast-facing window. It captured a scene that many artists and photographers have reproduced in oil, watercolor, and film, and that could be found matted and framed on the walls of office buildings all over the Boston area.

Alice appreciated the glorious advantages available to those fortunate enough to regularly observe the live version of this landscape. With the changes in the time of day or year, the quality and movement within the picture in her window altered in tirelessly interesting ways. On this sunny morning in November, Alice’s View of Boston from WJH: Fall displayed the sunlight sparkling like champagne fizz off the pale blue glass of the John Hancock building and several sculls steadily sliding along a smooth and silvery Charles toward the Museum of Science as if being pulled by a string in a motion experiment.

The view also provided her with a healthy awareness of life outside Harvard. A glimpse of the red-and-white neon CITGO sign flashing against a darkening sky over Fenway Park fired her nervous system like the sudden ring of an alarm clock, awakening her from the daily trance of her ambitions and obligations and triggering thoughts of heading home. Years ago, before she was tenured, her office had been in a small, windowless room within the interior of William James Hall. Lacking visual access to the world beyond its solid beige walls, Alice had regularly worked late into the night without even realizing it. On more than one occasion, she’d been stunned at the end of the day to discover that a nor’easter had buried Cambridge in more than a foot of snow and that the less focused and /or window-owning faculty had all wisely abandoned William James Hall in search of bread, milk, toilet paper, and home.

But now she needed to stop staring out the window. She was leaving later that afternoon for the annual Psychonomic Society meeting in Chicago, and she had a ton to accomplish before then. She looked over her to-do list.

Review Nature Neuroscience paper

Department meeting

Meet with TA’s

Cognition class

Finalize conference poster and itinerary

Run

Airport

She drank the last watery sip of her iced tea and began to study her lecture notes. Today’s lecture focused on semantics, the meaning of language, the third of six classes on linguistics, her favorite series of classes for this course. Even after twenty-five years of teaching, Alice still set aside an hour before class to prepare. Of course, at this point in her career, she could meticulously deliver 75 percent of any given lecture without consciously thinking about it. The other 25 percent, however, contained insights, innovative techniques, or points for discussion from current findings in the field, and she used the time immediately before class to refine the organization and presentation of this newer material. The inclusion of this constantly evolving information kept her passionate about her course subjects and mentally present in each class.

Emphasis for the faculty at Harvard tipped heavily toward research performance, and so a lot of less than optimal teaching was tolerated, by both the students and the administration. The emphasis Alice placed on teaching was in part motivated by the belief that she had both a duty and the opportunity to inspire the next generation in the field, or at the very least not to be the reason that the next would-be great thought leader in cognition abandoned psychology to major in political science instead. Plus, she simply loved teaching.

Ready for class, she checked her email.

Alice,

We’re still waiting on you for 3 slides to be included in Michael’s talk: 1 word retrieval graph, 1 model of language cartoon, and 1 text slide. His talk isn’t until Thursday at 1:00, but it would be a good idea for him to drop your slides into the presentation as soon as possible, make sure he’s comfortable with it all, and that it still falls within the allotted time. You can email them to either me or Michael.

We’re staying at the Hyatt. See you in Chicago.

Kind regards,

Eric Greenberg

A cold and dusty lightbulb flickered on inside Alice’s head. That was what the mysterious “Eric” had meant on one of her to-do lists last month. It didn’t refer to Eric Wellman at all. It was meant to remind her to email those slides to Eric Greenberg, a former colleague at Harvard, now a professor in the psychology department at Princeton. Alice and Dan had put together three slides describing a quick and dirty experiment Dan had run as part of a collaboration with Eric’s postdoc Michael, to be included in Michael’s talk at the psychonomic meeting. Before doing anything else that might distract her, Alice emailed the slides, along with sincerest apologies, to Eric. Fortunately, he’d get them in plenty of time. No harm done.

AS WITH MOST EVERYTHING AT Harvard, the lecture auditorium used for Alice’s cognition course was grander than necessary. The blue upholstered chairs arranged in stadium seating numbered several hundred more than the students enrolled in the class. An impressive, state-of-the-art audiovisual center stood at the back of the room, and a projection screen as big as those in any movie cinema hung at the front. While three men busily hooked up various cables to Alice’s computer and checked the lighting and sound, students wandered in, and Alice opened her “Linguistics Classes” folder on her laptop.

It contained six files: “Acquisition,” “Syntax,” “Semantics,” “Comprehension,” “Modeling,” and “Pathologies.” Alice read the titles again. She couldn’t remember which lecture she was supposed to give today. She’d just spent the last hour looking over one of these subjects but couldn’t remember which one. Was it “Syntax”? They all looked familiar to her, but none more salient than the others.

Ever since her visit with Dr. Moyer, each time Alice forgot something, her foreboding intensified. This wasn’t like forgetting where she left her BlackBerry charger or where John left his glasses. This wasn’t normal. She’d begun telling herself, in a tortured and paranoid voice, that she probably had a brain tumor. She also told herself not to freak out or worry John until she heard the more informed voice of Dr. Moyer, which unfortunately wouldn’t be until next week, after the psychonomic conference.

Determined to get through the next hour, she took a deep, frustrated breath. Although she didn’t remember the topic of today’s lecture, she did remember who her audience was.

“Can someone please tell me what it says on your syllabus for today?” Alice asked the class.

Several students called out in a staggered, collective voice, “Semantics.”

She had gambled correctly that at least a few of her students would pounce on the opportunity to be visibly helpful and knowledgeable. She didn’t worry for a second that any of them would think it grievous or strange that she didn’t know the subject of today’s class. There existed a great metaphysical distance in age, knowledge, and power between undergraduate students and professors.

Plus, over the course of the semester, they’d witnessed specific demonstrations of her competence in class and had been wowed by her dominant presence in the course literature. If any of them gave it any consideration whatsoever, they probably assumed that she was so distracted with other obligations more important than Psychology 256 that she didn’t have time even to glance at the syllabus before class. Little did they know that she’d just spent the last hour concentrating almost exclusively on semantics.

THE SUNNY DAY HAD TURNED cloudy and raw by evening, the first real flirtation with winter. A hard rain the night before had knocked most of the remaining leaves off their branches, leaving the trees nearly naked, underdressed for the coming weather. Comfortably warm in her fleece, Alice took her time walking home, enjoying the cold autumn air smell and the crunchy swishing sound her feet made as they strolled through the piles of grounded leaves.

The lights were on inside her house, and John’s bag and shoes rested next to the table by the door.

“Hello? I’m home,” said Alice.

John walked out from the study and stared at her, looking confused and at a loss for words. Alice stared back and waited, nervously sensing that something was dreadfully wrong. Her mind raced straight to her children. She stood frozen in the doorway, braced for horrible news.

“Aren’t you supposed to be in Chicago?”

“WELL, ALICE, ALL OF YOUR blood work came back normal, and your MRI is clean,” said Dr. Moyer. “We can do one of two things. We can wait, see how things go, see how you’re sleeping and how you’re doing in three months, or—”

“I want to see a neurologist.”

DECEMBER 2003

On the night of Eric Wellman’s holiday party, the sky felt low and thick, like it was going to snow. Alice hoped it would. Like most New Englanders, she’d never outgrown a childlike anticipation of the season’s first snow. Of course, also like most New Englanders, what she wished for in December she’d come to loathe by February, cursing her shovel and boots, desperate to replace the frigid, monochromatic tedium of winter with the milder pinks and yellow-greens of spring. But for tonight, snow would be lovely.

Each year, Eric and his wife, Marjorie, hosted a holiday party at their home for the entire psychology department. Nothing extraordinary ever happened at this event, but there were always small moments that Alice wouldn’t dream of missing—Eric sitting comfortably on the floor in a living room full of students and junior faculty on couches and chairs, Kevin and Glen wrestling for ownership of a Yankee-swapped Grinch doll, the race to get a slice of Marty’s legendary cheesecake.

Her colleagues were all brilliant and odd, quick to help and argue, ambitious and humble. They were family. Maybe she felt this way because she didn’t have living siblings or parents. Maybe the time of year made her sentimental, searching for meaning and belonging. Maybe that was part of it, but it was also much more.

They were more than colleagues. Triumphs of discovery, promotion, and publication were celebrated, but so were weddings and births and the accomplishments of their children and grandchildren. They traveled together to conferences all over the world, and many meetings were piggybacked with family vacations. And like in any family, it wasn’t always good times and yummy cheesecake. They supported one another through slumps of negative data and grant rejection, through waves of crippling self-doubt, through illness and divorce.

But most of all, they shared a passionate quest to understand the mind, to know the mechanisms driving human behavior and language, emotion and appetite. While the holy grail of this quest carried individual power and prestige, at its core it was a collaborative effort to know something valuable and give it to the world. It was socialism powered by capitalism. It was a strange, competitive, cerebral, and privileged life. And they were in it together.

The cheesecake gone, Alice snatched the last hot-fudge-drenched cream puff and looked for John. She found him in the living room in conversation with Eric and Marjorie just as Dan arrived.

Dan introduced them to his new wife, Beth, and they offered hearty congratulations and exchanged handshakes. Marjorie took their coats. Dan had on a suit and tie, and Beth wore a floor-length red dress. Late and much too formal for this party, they’d probably gone to another one first. Eric offered to get them drinks.

“I’ll have another one, too,” said Alice, the glass of wine in her hand still half full.

John asked Beth how she liked married life so far. Although they’d never met, Alice knew a little about her from Dan. She and Dan had been living together in Atlanta when Dan was accepted at Harvard. She’d stayed in Atlanta, originally content with a long-distance relationship and the promise of marriage after he graduated. Three years later, Dan had carelessly mentioned that it could easily take five to six, maybe even seven years for him to finish. They had married last month.

Alice excused herself to use the ladies’ room. On the way, she lingered in the long hallway that connected the newer front of the house to the older back, finishing her wine and cream puff as she admired the happy faces of Eric’s grandchildren pictured on the walls. After she found and used the bathroom, she wandered into the kitchen, poured herself another glass of wine, and fell captive to a boisterous conversation among several of the faculty wives.

The wives touched elbows and shoulders as they moved about the kitchen, they knew the characters in each other’s stories, they praised and teased each other, they laughed easily. These women all shopped and lunched and attended book clubs together. These women were close. Alice was close with their husbands, and it set her apart. She mostly listened and drank her wine, nodding and smiling as she followed along, her interest not truly engaged, like running on a treadmill instead of on an actual road.

She filled her wineglass again, slipped unnoticed out of the kitchen, and found John in the living room in conversation with Eric, Dan, and a young woman in a red dress. Alice stood next to Eric’s grand piano and strummed the top of it with her fingers while she listened to them talk. Each year, Alice hoped that someone would offer to play it, but no one ever did. She and Anne had taken lessons for several years as children, but now she could remember only “Baby Elephant Walk” and “Turkey in the Straw” without sheet music, and only the right hand. Maybe this woman in the fancy red dress knew how to play.

At a pause in the conversation, Alice and the woman in red made eye contact.

“I’m sorry, I’m Alice Howland. I don’t believe we’ve met.”

The woman looked nervously at Dan before she answered. “I’m Beth.”

She seemed young enough to be a graduate student, but by December, Alice would have at least recognized even a first-year student. She remembered Marty mentioning that he’d hired a new postdoctoral fellow, a woman.

“Are you Marty’s new postdoc?” asked Alice.

The woman checked with Dan again. “I’m Dan’s wife.”

“Oh, so nice to finally meet you, congratulations!”

No one spoke. Eric’s gaze bounced from John’s eyes to Alice’s wineglass and back to John, carrying a silent secret. Alice wasn’t in on it.

“What?” asked Alice.

“You know what? It’s getting late, and I’ve got to get up early. You mind if we get going?” asked John.

Once they were outside, she meant to ask John what that awkward saccade was about, but she became distracted by the gentle beauty of the cotton-candy snow that had begun to fall while they were inside, and she forgot.

THREE DAYS BEFORE CHRISTMAS, ALICE sat in the waiting room of the Memory Disorders Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston pretending to read Health magazine. Instead, she observed the others who waited. They were all in pairs. A woman who looked twenty years older than Alice sat next to a woman who looked at least twenty years older than her—most likely her mother. A woman with big, unnaturally black hair and big gold jewelry talked loudly and slowly in a thick Boston accent to her father, who sat in a wheelchair and never looked up from his perfectly white shoes. A bony, silver-haired woman flipped pages of a magazine too quickly to be reading anything next to an overweight man with matching hair and a resting tremor in his right hand. Probably husband and wife.

The wait to hear her name took forever and seemed longer. Dr. Davis had a young, hairless face. He wore black-rimmed glasses and a white lab coat, unbuttoned. He looked like he used to be thin, but his lower torso slumped a bit beyond the outline of his open coat, reminding Alice of Tom’s comments about the poor health habits of physicians. He sat in a chair behind his desk and invited her to have a seat across from him.

“So Alice, tell me what’s been going on.”

“I’ve been having lots of problems remembering, and it doesn’t feel normal. I’m forgetting words in lectures and conversation, I need to put ‘cognition class’ on my to-do list or I might forget to go teach it, I completely forgot to go to the airport for a conference in Chicago and missed my flight. I also didn’t know where I was for a couple of minutes once in Harvard Square, and I’m a professor at Harvard, I’m there every day.”

“How long have these things been going on?”

“Since September, maybe this summer.”

“Alice, did anyone come here with you?”

“No.”

“Okay. In the future, you’re going to have to bring a family member or someone who sees you regularly in with you. You’re complaining about a problem with your memory; you may not be the most reliable source of what’s been going on.”

She felt embarrassed, like a child. And his words “in the future” harassed her every thought, commanding obsessive attention, like water dripping from a faucet.

“Okay,” she said.

“Are you taking any kind of medicine?”

“No, just a multivitamin.”

“Any sleeping pills, diet pills, drugs of any kind?”

“No.”

“How much do you drink?”

“Not a lot. One or two glasses of wine with dinner.”

“Are you a vegan?”

“No.”

“Have you had any sort of past injury to your head?”

“No.”

“Have you had any surgeries?”

“No.”

“How are you sleeping?”

“Perfectly fine.”

“Have you ever been depressed?”

“Not since I was a teenager.”

“How’s your stress level?”

“The usual, I thrive under stress.”

“Tell me about your parents. How’s their health?”

“My mother and sister died in a car accident when I was eighteen. My father died of liver failure last year.”

“Hepatitis?”

“Cirrhosis. He was an alcoholic.”

“How old was he?”

“Seventy-one.”

“Did he have any other problems with his health?”

“Not that I know of. I didn’t really see much of him over the last several years.”

And when she did, he was incoherent, drunk.

“What about other family?”

She relayed her limited knowledge of her extended family’s medical history.

“Okay, I’m going to tell you a name and address, and you’re going to repeat it back to me. Then, we’re going to do some other things, and I’m going to ask you to repeat the same name and address again later. Ready, here it is—John Black, 42 West Street, Brighton. Can you repeat that for me?”

She did.

“How old are you?”

“Fifty.”

“What is today’s date?”

“December twenty-second, 2003.”

“What season is it?”

“Winter.”

“Where are we right now?”

“Eighth floor, MGH.”

“Can you name some of the streets near here?”

“Cambridge, Fruit, Storrow Drive.”

“Okay, what time of day is it?”

“Late morning.”

“Name the months backward from December.”

She did.

“Count backward from one hundred by six.”

He stopped her at seventy-six.

“Name these objects.”

He showed her a series of six cards with pencil drawings on them.

“Hammock, feather, key, chair, cactus, glove.”

“Okay, before pointing to the window, touch your right cheek with your left hand.”

She did.

“Can you write a sentence about today’s weather on this piece of paper?”

She wrote, “It is a sunny but cold winter morning.”

“Now, draw a clock and show the time as twenty minutes to four.”

She did.

“And copy this design.”

He showed her a picture of two intersecting pentagons. She copied them.

“Okay, Alice, hop up on the table. We’re going to do a neurological exam.”

She followed his penlight with her eyes, she tapped her thumbs and pointer fingers together rapidly, she walked heel to toe in a straight line across the room. She did everything easily and quickly.

“Okay, what was that name and address I told you earlier?”

“John Black…”

She stopped and searched Dr. Davis’s face. She couldn’t remember the address. What did that mean? Maybe she just hadn’t paid close enough attention.

“It’s Brighton, but I can’t remember the street address.”

“Okay, is it twenty-four, twenty-eight, forty-two, or forty-eight?”

She didn’t know.

“Take a guess.”

“Forty-eight.”

“Was it North Street, South Street, East Street, or West Street?”

“South Street?”

His face and body language didn’t expose whether she’d guessed right, but if she had to guess again, that wasn’t it.

“Okay, Alice, we have your recent blood work and MRI. I want you to go for some additional blood work and a lumbar puncture. You’re going to come back in four to five weeks, and you’ll have an appointment for neuropsychological testing on that same day, before you see me.”

“What do you think is going on? Is this just normal forgetting?”