Thanks Koru_Kiwi. I go back Thursday afternoon to get the results.

I'm a little nervous. I was *so* tired, and I think that part of that is that I've been working to give up junk food/sugars. I was about a week in, and expected to feel better - but my brain was just *exhausted*, to the point that when I came home and tried to finish up some stuff for work, I couldn't really focus at all. I was writing sentences and leaving out phrases (and not realizing until I reread them), and I meant to copy a section of what I was writing to edit it (it was a second item), but I overwrote it instead, without realizing, and then had to rewrite it. It was pretty terrible.

She asked me if I was exhausted when we were getting started (as part of the setup, checking to make sure it was OK to run the test... with other questions like whether you're on medication, if you've eaten today, alcohol/caffeine use, etc.) I told her that I was tired and about the sugar issues, so hopefully she can account for that. But, I didn't realize *how* tired I was, until I got home and tried to work. Yikes.

It was also weird, in the sense that, it felt like the environment was different enough from day-to-day life, that I didn't feel like my brain was behaving the way it normally would. She understood though, and said that's normal, and that really she's just looking for patterns, which tend to be consistent, even when the situation is weird.

So, we'll see!

My testing had 5 sets of 3 tasks. The first task was always to sit for a minute with my eyes closed, and the second was always to sit with my eyes open (trying to look at one point). The third one varied, and we did these:

- Listen to the person read a paragraph for one minute. After the minute (when the machine was off) - give a short summary of what she read. (I think most of us can do this easily, but again, since it was a "test" environment, my brain was on hyper-crazy-overdrive! I don't normally listen like that. It wasn't even that I was intently listening, it's that my brain was bouncing around, trying to remember every word of what she was saying, trying to create the summary as she was talking... very weirdly unfocused.)

- I also had to read a paragraph on a screen (for one minute), then summarize once the machine was off.

- She read a sequence of numbers, and I had to repeat them back. This one was weird. Since I was talking with the machine on, and you want to minimize muscle movement, I had to sort of "mumble" the numbers while keeping my mouth as still as possible. I felt like I was drunk or half-asleep lol. So, when we got to my last string (as many numbers as I could remember and get right)... I got halfway through, then literally mumbled something like, "uhhh, i dunno"... halfheartedly, lol. I think I might have tried harder if I weren't exhausted and weren't mumbling, the mumbling made me feel a bit unintelligent.

- I was supposed to spend a minute thinking about some future, positive change that I expected... it had to be in the future, positive, about me, and I had to mentally experience it. I think I can do this OK normally, but I feel like it was really hard in the test setting. I suspect my brain is not going to look very competent at imagining a happy future !

- And, omg! This one was terrible. I had to look at a passage on a screen and count the number of times the letters "t" "h" and "e" occurred together. It could be as the word "the", but also in any words, so like the word "other" would count. If I got to the end (during the minute), I had to go back and recount and see if they could match up. I couldn't - my mind kept getting pulled in to reading the words. The first time through I only found ONE! Then, I skipped around, found another, and another... but I had no confidence in my final answer (which was, "err... 4 or 5, maybe?").

The person doing the testing was really nice, funny, and smart. So I enjoyed talking with her and didn't feel too awful about the testing. She mentioned that we're not testing "executive function" - the test is really NOT about getting the right answer, it's about watching what your brain does as you try to get the right answer

But, I still worry that maybe my test is going to be adversely affected by level of exhaustion... crazy work stuff right now is not helping, I probably should have scheduled it out a couple weeks, to get my through the insanity at work!

Probably more than anyone wanted to know, but it really is kind of fascinating. I'm hoping it can help - but not sure how I'll be able to manage the time away from work (plus regular therapy appointments that I have to leave work for). Argh!