The Last Goodnights by John West

Author:John West
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781582439822
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2020-12-02T00:00:00+00:00

THURSDAY, APRIL 1

I headed out for an early brunch with Walter Seltzer. Getting a chance to see him on my quick trips to L.A. was always a delightful tonic. He’s always been like a favorite uncle and then some—with a razor-sharp wit and martini-dry sense of humor. We had omelets and an invigorating catch-up session on friends, family, and politics, and once again he proved that he had the most agile mind of any octogenarian on the planet—more agile than most people half his age. Just like K used to be.

I hustled home to make sure K was ready to embark on one of her ladies’ luncheons; she appreciated my double-checking that she had all the essentials in her purse before she left the house. I was glad she occasionally felt comfortable in the outside world and wasn’t completely housebound yet. She was getting close, though. Very few things could entice her away from the safety of home and her familiar routine.

When she returned from lunch, I took her to UCLA for her neurology appointment with Dr. Jeffrey Cummings: a severe-looking fellow—tall and lean, with a riverboat gambler’s goatee—but gentle mannered. I was glad to see him treat K as more of a colleague, and not just a patient. Certainly, he was used to dealing with elderly folks in varying stages of neurological deterioration and knew what style of interaction would be most effective with whom, but I felt sure, based on how he treated K, that he genuinely liked her.

As Dr. Cummings asked K questions, I watched him scrutinize every nuance of her answers—what she said and how she said it. He also put her through several tests: remembering three words; naming as many animals as she could in one minute; working a basic arithmetic problem; copying a simple drawing.

It was hard to watch K struggle with such easy tasks. At one time she’d been a talented cartoonist, but now that talent had vanished. Cummings showed her a picture of a triangle poking into the side of a circle, and K laboriously drew something vaguely resembling two adjacent rectangles with triangular tops.

The three words that Cummings asked her to remember at the start of the exam were “penny,” “table,” and “baseball.” When he asked her to recall them about five minutes later, she couldn’t, but said she thought “there was a ‘pig’ in there somewhere.”

How many animals could she name in one minute? “Cat, dog, wolf, rabbit, horse, cow, reindeer, alligator, elephant, lion, zebra.” That was all. No pig this time. And the test-taking alone made her anxious, especially the list of animals because it was timed, and she started panting and puffing from the tension (not helped by her emphysema). Clearly, she felt even more frustrated by knowing that she was having difficulty doing what should have been easy for her. Once upon a time.

The simple arithmetic test was too bad to describe.

But at the end of it all, Dr. Cummings said that K had experienced no noticeable decline since her last appointment, two months before.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.