With fingers poised over the numbers on the keyboard, the pharmacist, as always, asked me, “what is your birthday?”
I rattled off the numbers, stopped and looked at him, “And what are you going to do when I get into my dotage and can’t remember my birthday?”
He stopped and looked at me thoughtfully.
He didn’t ask me my birthdate the next time.
It’s a reasonable question. I have reached the age when clinicians routinely assess my mental acuity.
A student interning at the physical therapy rehab tested me first. Her supervisor asked, “Can she practice by testing you?” I nodded. She began asking a series of questions. At one point, she said, “Now I am going to give you four words to remember. I will ask you the words later.”
“Four? It is usually three,” I thought thinking of my husband’s tales from the medical clinic.
I repeated the four words and scrambled to develop some quick way to remember them.
The intern switched back to other questions for a few minutes before she asked me, “Now, what were the four words I gave you?”I
I rattled off three and stopped. I could not remember the fourth. They looked sad.
They did not ask me to draw a clock set at 10:10.
Now that I can do. I position the 12, 3, 6 and 9, fill in the other numbers, draw the big and little hands and put my pencil down.
I know the test because my husband has been drawing that clock for years. After several such tests, the next time he was asked, my husband smiled and drew a digital clock: a rectangle with 10:10 written inside it.
The clinician looked at him and said, “hmm, we may need to reconsider that test.”
So true. I already know that some grandchildren have no idea how to read anything other than a digital clock, let alone draw one. If that were the only test, they would qualify for special care long before they finish high school.
The three (not four) word recall touches on short term memory. What they really should do is ask me to go to another room and get a specific item. Too often these days by the time I arrive, I wonder ‘why’ I went there.
My late aunt not only forgot between one room and the next, she forgot as she did simple tasks. At her funeral, her grandson said, “You know Grandma really liked to wash dishes. She would go right to the sink after every meal and begin washing dishes. Sometimes we would take dishes from the clean pile, and slip them around her to the dirty pile. One day we did that several times until she looked up and said, ‘hey, wait a minute!’ and laughed with us.”
I chuckle when I recall my most recent memory test. The visiting nurse said, “Remember these three words. Ball, door, tree.” I quickly conjured up a picture of throwing the ball through the door at the tree. “Okay, ball, door, tree,” I repeated back to her.
She nodded and asked me questions about my sleeping habits, my weight and medications. Then she gathered up her equipment and drove away. She won’t be back for at least six months.
My husband looked at me and said, “She forgot to ask you for the three words.”
I reflected a moment smiled at the irony and agreed, “Yes, she did,”
That’s okay. I still don’t recall that fourth word but I review those three words every day. The next time she walks in the door ready to challenge my short term memory, I will spit out, “Ball, door, tree.”
Just try and trick me with that one.