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Time is not my friend. Telling the time is such a challenge now. 

I’m standing with my jacket on, just glancing at, well, not glancing at the clock, I’m staring at the clock, frightened, because time is not my friend. Telling the time is such a challenge now. I understand and can tell you what the numbers say, but I don’t understand or I can’t convert it into actual timeframe. What I do know is that I’m alright with 10 o’clock, anything that’s o’clock is easy. So, I’m leaving the house at 10 o’clock, so I’m glancing at the clock, seeing so that I leave in plenty of time. 

I have difficulty measuring time, difficulty understanding time, and my daughter and I have tried to identify how she could help me. One of the things I do have and have used over the last 3 years is my talking watch, because it not only tells me the time, but if I press it again, it tells me the day and the date, so that sooths me and helps me in another way. 

But yes, my daughter and I, we talk about dementia time. It means nothing, it can be minutes, weeks, hours, days, nothing. It means nothing to me. So Donna’ll say to me, my daughter, which defuses a lot of kind of afraid conversations: ‘Oh, are we talking dementia time, mum?’  And I just smile and laugh, and I know she’s telling me in the kindest, nicest way, that once  again I’ve got time distorted, and it is causing an issue. It could cause an issue if we hadn’t these smart things in place to help us. 

So yes, time distortion. I’m absolutely sure, I’m looking at the clock, and I’m sure the time is  going backwards. You know, one minute I look at it and it says 10, and then I look at it again, and I think ‘Oh my god, it’s going backwards’, and then I need to go and check. And then I start  to say ‘Was it 10 o’clock or 12 o’clock?’ And then I have to go hunting things again. It causes distress. 

So, dementia time is what I’m on.

An audio version of this blog is available at: https://soundcloud.com/dementia-diaries/agnes-3-nottingham-uni