So you walk in on him at three o'clock on a Saturday afternoon and he looks at you with genuine surprise and says, "What are you doing out in the middle of the night?"
At which point you realize you've sailed off the edge of the map. Up 'til now you've been flattering yourself that you have some sense of what's going on. You log time as an amateur neurologist and wander through Wikipedia and tell yourself you understand that he's not handling visual information the way he used to, and it's hard for him to interpret what he sees. But all of a sudden you realize that you're out beyond that. In point of fact he's not processing visual information at all. His time sense is based completely on internal references -- it feels like the middle of the night, so it's the middle of the night. What's outside the windows could be anything. He doesn't register it as such.
In the past couple of weeks the calendar has gone completely by the boards -- "Thursday" no longer connects to "Friday" in any meaningful sense. Last week I called him on a Wednesday night to tell him I'd be visiting on Thursday and he called me three hours later wondering why I hadn't turned up yet. Emotionalism is up. Repetitiveness is up. People are getting conflated -- he talks about one that more or less combines my mother and his mother and his sister (common ground: women he cared for), and another that blends E, the home health aide, and H, his cousin (women who care for him).
So the slide is pretty rapid.
But the night-for-day effect -- well, that's just across the border of a whole new country.
Comments