Still Alice Page 0,12
Otherwise, she felt young, strong, and healthy.
She thought about her mother. They looked alike. Her memory of her mother’s face, serious and intent, freckles sprinkled on her nose and cheekbones, didn’t contain a single sag or wrinkle. She hadn’t lived long enough to earn them. Alice’s mother had died when she was forty-one. Alice’s sister, Anne, would’ve been forty-eight now. Alice tried to visualize what Anne might look like, sitting in the booth with them tonight, with her own husband and children, but couldn’t imagine her.
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