I had to cheat on my cognitive test!
Another trip to Mayo, and I am not sure any of it is useful. To recap, after spending over $100,000 of your taxpayer money, they found my organs are all in remarkably healthy condition - except my brain. And there is nothing they can do about that, other than to prescribe medication. So here we are.
They wanted to do cognitive testing, which took three hours to complete. It is far more difficult than the "Montreal Protocol" shown above (which I sent to Mr. See during a break, as a joke). They give you a string of numbers - like seven of them - and you have to read them back, in reverse. I didn't think I would do well at that, but the trick for me was to read back the numbers first in original order, quickly (like it was one word) and then reverse the order.
I did well with arranging the bi-colored blocks into patterns, which sounds like child's play (and it was at first) but when they keep adding blocks and putting the pattern on the diagonal, it does get tricky. I can see some "normal" people struggling with this.
But the interesting part was word listing. "Give me all the words you can think of starting with the letter F, you have one minute!" My mind went blank - possibly because it reminded me of the scene from Sense and Sensibility where they try to guess the name of Elinor's new boyfriend:
"His name begins with F. F? A promising letter. Foster? Forrest? Fotheringay? Featherty? - Fortescue? - Fondant?"
I sort of stalled after that.
The point of the test is to establish a starting point to measure my mental decline. They can re-test a year or two from now and chart where I am falling behind. Again, the purpose of this is somewhat ambiguous to me - I already know how far I have fallen. What's the point of drawing a graph?
All that being said, I have no doubt I did better on the test than Trump did!
