When I was little, my mother was famous for losing her coffee cup.
She had a favorite mug, handmade and glazed in earthy browns, which she used every day. She’d carry it from room to room, tending to children or housework, and set it down whenever she needed the use of both hands.
And then she’d walk away and forget where she’d left it.
Inevitably, as soon as she’d give up and pour herself a second cup of coffee, she’d find her favorite mug again.
This happened so routinely that I have vivid memories of making games out of it—seeing the cup on a shelf and giggling while my mother looked everywhere else. I couldn’t have been more than six or seven years old.
When I was in my late 30s or so, a new game started to develop in the family. My mother would stop what she was saying because she had forgotten a word, and then she’d talk her way around it. She’d describe what she meant, use gestures, or come up with (often exceedingly creative) alternative names for things. Whoever was around would have to fill in the blank.
Once, when trying to come up “welding,” she said, “the gun that shoots fire at metal.”
I lovingly called this game “Mom Charades.”
In 2022, my mother and I went on a road trip from Oregon to Minnesota. It was the most concentrated time we’d spent together in a long while, and there were a lot of rounds of Mom Charades. We laughed so much, all the time, about genuinely funny things and also things that no one else would ever find half as amusing as we did because you not only had to be there, you had to be us.
We had such an incredibly good time that we did it again in 2023 and 2024.
By year two, I had started keeping notes of not only things we saw and did but also things that made us crack the hell up—and several of them were a variation on Mom Charades, in which she would use one word when she meant another.
My favorite was the night when she felt like she was taking forever to get ready for bed and said, “it’s all mayonnaise over here.” I was flummoxed. Did she have mayonnaise in her suitcase? Had it leaked everywhere? WHY WAS THERE MAYONNAISE IN HER SUITCASE?
When I finally put together that she meant to reference being “slower than molasses” but had swapped “molasses” for “mayonnaise,” we laughed so hard I cried for ten minutes.
We had started the 2023 road trip tired, both of us racing in the weeks before departure to finish projects. It was day four or five when we finally felt more caught up on sleep and less out of it, but by then my mother had already started to worry about her brain.
I’d guess she drove about 85% of the time in 2022, and had started 2023 as if she intended to repeat that. She has always loved to drive, so I didn’t mind being the passenger (it gave me more time to knit). We were on our first of a two-day visit to Grand Teton National Park in 2023, though, when she pulled into a parking spot and didn’t put the car into park before taking her foot off the brake.
I noticed that we were rolling before she did, and the car didn’t move more than a foot before she had it in park. But she was rattled.
“I don’t know what’s going on,” she said, shaking her head. “Maybe it’s instant-onset Alzheimer’s.”
That, I assured her, was not a thing.
By the time we left Wyoming, we were back to our normal selves, well-rested and having a grand old time laughing at inside jokes no one else would understand.
The unsettling moments of the early part of the 2023 road trip nagged at her long after we got home, despite how well the rest of the trip had gone, and she started talking with her doctor about it.
He’d been her doctor for something like 40 years, and they were good friends who socialized outside the office, so he knew her well. I had encouraged her to ask him about getting evaluated for ADHD, thinking that might be part of the cause of her struggle to focus.
(And before you protest, it wasn’t just the thing in the Wyoming parking lot. She has a lifetime of stories that would make anyone who’s half-paying attention think she was ADHD, not to mention her always-busy schedule and the whole starting-twelve-things-and-finishing-three thing.)
The doctor was reluctant to prescribe anything for her, but he finally relented and she noticed a difference almost immediately. She felt calmer, and she loved that feeling. I was thrilled for her.
Along with the new meds, the doctor also referred her to a local neurologist to “rule out” anything else. That neurologist, who I would later dub “The Bad Neurologist,” sent her up to OHSU in August 2024 for a brain scan after one brief office visit.
(Yes, The Bad Neurologist sent my mother for a brain scan 85 miles away without ever doing any kind of cognitive testing.)
Well, you can probably guess the rest, since you’re here.
The scan showed asymmetrical plaque at the back of her brain, which she found out at a routine visit with her primary care doctor when he glanced over the results and said the word, “Alzheimer’s”—followed quickly by, “I should let the neurologist talk to you about this,” when he realized he probably shouldn’t have said a fucking thing.
Yes, I was and will forever be furious at him for that.
We left for the 2024 road trip soon after, and you will not be surprised to learn that the first half was pretty rough. I was adamant that we had not yet received an official diagnosis (she hadn’t been given a follow-up appointment with The Bad Neurologist, she had to request one, and it wasn’t scheduled until after we got home), and that, at most, what she had now was probably mild cognitive impairment. She was adamant that it was all happening right now and was, understandably, scared and depressed.
You will also not be surprised to learn that the follow-up appointment with The Bad Neurologist was not good. She offered no context, had little time for questions, gave us some resources and other doctors to call, and then we were done. She was about to quit working anyway, leaving the practice and the field entirely, and it showed.
It wasn’t until April of 2025 that we had an actual follow-up appointment at OHSU with the doctor I call “The Good Neurologist,” a full eight months after the brain scan, during which we finally got some cognitive testing and an actual Alzheimer’s diagnosis. (The Good Neurologist had some choice words for The Bad Neurologist, too, it’s not just me who thinks she was shit at her job. TGN was disappointed TBN had left her practice—he wanted her to see the snarky notes he was leaving for her in my mother’s medical records.)
It’s easy for me to slip into wondering how long my mother’s brain has been building plaques, how things might have been different if we had recognized it sooner and asked for a referral to a neurologist, but it’s equally easy for me to close that door. My mother has always been forgetful. Nothing in her behavior seemed out of the ordinary to anyone close to her, and she’s always been so incredibly healthy and active that it seemed like she’d be that way forever.
And, of course, no one stays that way forever.