Who Are You Again?

Yesterday, I went for a neuropsychological evaluation. The purpose was to get a psychological profile on 3 key areas: memory, cognition and personality. This will serve as a benchmark to cross-check against post-surgery.

I was sat in a lab with a clinical psychologist who spent 2 hours taking me through a series of different tests. The tests ranged from "are you kidding me?”-easy to "you're hurting my brain”-hard.

A few examples are: memorising pictures, faces and number sequences, working out sequences in picture diagrams, explaining the relationships between different objects or abstract concepts, general knowledge (I found it hard not to snigger when she asked me “What is a thermometer?”) as well as a personality test which seemed to focus specifically on mood.

I won't get the results for a few days but just from sitting the tests, I felt that I did well in most of them with the exception of the visual memory tests. I could remember sequences and stories without any problems, but when it came to remembering the details within some picture cards, I struggled. At one point I couldn’t even remember seeing the card, let alone the details inside it.

I wonder if it has anything to do with the tumour because I’ve been told that it’s impacting on the part of the brain that controls memory and the truth is that I have been finding it harder to remember people’s faces and names over the last couple of years. I had simply put this down to aging but maybe there’s more to it than that. In fact just the other day I… um… what was it that happened?

Oh never mind.