December 8, 2023: Doing better than your relatives is relative -

Yesterday, I completed my first 3.5 hour testing session at OHSU for the Alzheimer’s study, and I’m reporting that it was fun and fascinating, and left me feeling good. If you are over 65 and can spare three sessions over the course of a year, you might enjoy it, too.

I got confused on the way there, when Terwilliger at 6^th Ave was a maze of Road Work and Detour signs. Then I got confused by the many parking pavilions, but no parking. And then I was running late and dismayed by directions like, “Take the elevator to the third floor, make a left, cross the sky bridge, and then make three lefts and take the third elevator on your left, down to the third floor.”

Rick used to work at OHSU. Before I left, he mentioned twice that it’s on a hill. I think that was shorthand for “one third floor won’t line up with another third floor.” I paid scant attention, because Rick maintains that we never got lost in Venice, as “you can’t get lost on an island.” Ha.

I ran aground in a long hall, staring at my phone. A kindly human rescued me. So I walked in ten minutes late and asked if I had flunked already, but Nora, the tester, said no. I told her I hoped to do poorly in session one, so that my scores wouldn’t decline over the year. She said that was a strategy.

The tests were of all sorts - orientation questions and memory questions, as you would expect. But there were also nonverbal tests, spatial tests, function tests, and a set of practical, life-skill questions.

Some things I aced. (Good news for my old book-business buddies: Did you think your ability to retain 10-digit or 13-digit ISBNs might be a non-transferable skill? NOT SO!) Some things I couldn’t do, but I’d never been able to do them. Some things I did with difficulty, or so badly I’d start to laugh. Nora said, “It’s supposed to be hard. If everybody did everything easily, we wouldn’t have any data.”

I’d anticipated I might get sad if there were repeats of the mental status questions my mom always had to answer, but Nora said we weren’t doing the MoCA. (I ended up friends with the nurse who administered that one to Mom. I said WHY every year? Do you think she is faking it? Do you think she’s going to get better? She said, ”Insurance.” Then we had a nice chat and after that we’d always spend a little time catching up.)  

(I did not have to take the MoCA. No drawing clocks, no drawing cubes.)

I was chipper right up until the life-skill questions. Then I got flashbacks to that poor-judgement, non-compliant phase, which was such a struggle. When Nora posed, “Give me two reasons why you need to pay your bills,” I said, with excess feeling, “Give ME two reasons why you should wear CLOTHING when you leave the house!” She countered, “Or why you don’t need to put on ALL YOUR CLOTHING at once!” I said, “Or why you shouldn’t steal from the grocery store!”

Then she said, “My mom died of it too, about when yours did. Maybe by the time my son, and your grandson, are old ….?”

So there you go. If you volunteer for this one, you might enjoy it as much as I did. You might even find your car, eventually, and get home safely, and take a nice nap.