10:30
The Timestamp
The call comes in at 5:43 a.m.. My phone is turned off, but the notification is the first thing I see when I turn it back on at 6:15. She’s left a voicemail, and I read the transcription: I’m completely confused about everything. I would appreciate it if you give me a call. I try several times but she doesn’t pick up. I finally reach her late mid-morning. “What’s going on?” I ask, and Amy tells me a long story, about things that happened during the night, and she’s not quite sure whether they were real or dreams. Everything, she says, was bizarre. Amy remembers a nurse coming into her apartment while she was holding a knife, which she had just picked up off the floor because she’d dropped it after slicing open a bag from Amazon. She was on her way to put the knife back into the knife holder “which is a perfectly normal thing to do, right?” but I was already imagining it from the nurse’s perspective: a fall risk with dementia, prone to hallucinations, holding a knife.
“Now, they want me to have someone stay with me overnight,” Amy says. “It’s crazy.” I tell her they probably just want to make sure she’s safe. Amy snorts. “Also, my aide Renee told me that I have dementia.” Pause. “That can’t be right.”
“Wow,” I say, because, well, wow.
“I mean, I know a woman here who has dementia. She sits in the hallway all hunched over and keeps asking her aide when it’s going to be 10:30. When is it going to be 10:30? When is it going to be 10:30?”Amy says. “It’s so…strange.”
“Their thoughts are on a loop,” I say, making this about them.
“I’m not like that,” she says.
“No, of course not.” I won’t let her worry, or worse, be afraid.
“It’s just that things keep changing. That’s what confuses me. I wake up and everything is different.”
I am in the middle of suggesting she stick to a more predictable routine, a skim across the top of this dark ocean, when I look over at the clock and see it’s almost 10:30.