28 November 2007 - Tina, Speech and Memory Therapy Person and the ImPACT Test

Dr. Sanchez set me up to take this thing called an ImPACT test. Beats the hell out of me what the capital letters mean, but that's what the thing was called. At 5pm Tuesday, I went into Tina's office and sat through a battery of the same questions I have been asked and answered at least fifteen times since this all started. Normally, that would grind me, since redundancy is a raging pet peeve of mine, but since (a) different people are doing it, (b) each one has a different specialty and will pick up on something new in each of my answers and (c) my memory so entirely sucks that I can barely recall doing this before, I gladly comply.

As I was describing my dizziness, a lightbulb went on over Tina's head. She said that I was describing sensations which are spot-on something that her colleague Stephanie works with - Vestibular Alignment. Beats the poo out of me what that means too, but Tina described it as putting some equilibrium crystals in my skull back where they belong after they got knocked out of place by the pipe incident. That sounds rather new-agey, but Akron General sponsors it and Anthem covers it - and at this point if a doctor told me sacrificing a chicken to Guluundu at dawn would work (and Anthem covered it), my alarm is set and knives are sharpened.

Then we did the ImPACT Test. It is a battery of little computerized mental exercises that evaluates short-term memory, reaction time, and brain-hand-eye coordination. One of the tests was as simple as "Hit the Q key when you see a red circle and the P key when you see a blue square." Some were more brain screwing-withing such as "Click the mouse when the color of the word and the word itself match" then they slap you with the word "GREEN" written in blue, the word "BLUE" written in red, and so on. I felt my brain sweating by the time I was done with that thing.

Some of the feedback was instant, some is to be evaluated by Dr. Sanchez and Tina to give them and idea of just how messed up I am so they know when and how to proceed. I'll probably find out more tomorrow morning when I meet Tina for my Speech / Memory Therapy session.