Saturday, October 02, 2004
Neuropsyched out....
The whole thing ended up taking five and a half hours. Apparently my medical/mental history takes a lot more time to document than the average person's.
The actual test part was conducted by the doc's assistant, who was also very nice. I studied psychology (minored in it) in college, so many of the tests were familiar to me, and some of them were actually fun for me. The only one I really hated was the "personality" test, where you answer melodramatic questions designed to elicit whether you might be bipolar, paranoid/delusional, compulsive, etc.
I did extremely well on the word tests, so no change there. I was a bit relieved and hope that they compare the tests I did poorly on to my word tests rather than comparing me to the population at large, where I might be considered only slightly below average. To me, the memory loss seems very dramatic, but maybe I did better there than I thought?
The areas where I really struggled were ones dealing with recall of spoken words, recall of photos and one where you had to do math in your head. Oddly enough, my recall of written word is just fine, and I think I got all of them right. I proved I am completely ambidextrous by doing the pegboard test once with each hand and got the exact same score on both.
There was one I'd never seen before, where the word for a color and the actual ink used to print the color didn't match (the word "green" printed in red ink). You had to read the list of words as they were written, which I was able to do. But then you had to say what color the ink on each word was, and I kept messing it up and reciting the word instead.
But even though some of the tests were fun, they were also extremely exhausting. I'm not sure the fatigue affected the tests as much I as was expecting. I know I did have a headache when I finished, and I was feeling a bit weak and disoriented as well.
So I don't know if the memory problems will be considered significant in terms of the test. I will find out the results in a few weeks after I get back from vacation. I'm both hoping and not hoping that it will show that the illness is adversely affecting me, if that makes any sense.
Pain level: 7
Fatigue level: 9
The actual test part was conducted by the doc's assistant, who was also very nice. I studied psychology (minored in it) in college, so many of the tests were familiar to me, and some of them were actually fun for me. The only one I really hated was the "personality" test, where you answer melodramatic questions designed to elicit whether you might be bipolar, paranoid/delusional, compulsive, etc.
I did extremely well on the word tests, so no change there. I was a bit relieved and hope that they compare the tests I did poorly on to my word tests rather than comparing me to the population at large, where I might be considered only slightly below average. To me, the memory loss seems very dramatic, but maybe I did better there than I thought?
The areas where I really struggled were ones dealing with recall of spoken words, recall of photos and one where you had to do math in your head. Oddly enough, my recall of written word is just fine, and I think I got all of them right. I proved I am completely ambidextrous by doing the pegboard test once with each hand and got the exact same score on both.
There was one I'd never seen before, where the word for a color and the actual ink used to print the color didn't match (the word "green" printed in red ink). You had to read the list of words as they were written, which I was able to do. But then you had to say what color the ink on each word was, and I kept messing it up and reciting the word instead.
But even though some of the tests were fun, they were also extremely exhausting. I'm not sure the fatigue affected the tests as much I as was expecting. I know I did have a headache when I finished, and I was feeling a bit weak and disoriented as well.
So I don't know if the memory problems will be considered significant in terms of the test. I will find out the results in a few weeks after I get back from vacation. I'm both hoping and not hoping that it will show that the illness is adversely affecting me, if that makes any sense.
Pain level: 7
Fatigue level: 9
Comments:
Post a Comment
