This morning i rode over to the Brain and Spinal Injury Center at SF General and played lab rat with Sherry, the nice young woman i’ve been seeing every few months ever since i woke up on a gurney in the ER January before last and she convinced me that the look at my brain they’d taken the liberty of taking while i was conveniently unconscious had revealed that i was an excellent candidate for a study they were doing on people who’d had their bells rung.
They keep coming up with fascinating mazes for me to run, so i keep going back. Besides, i can make her laugh just by telling the truth, like this morning when she was going through the preliminary questions just to make sure i was still somewhat sane and asked my age, and i responded, “chronologically, developmentally, or emotionally?”
And then the real tests began, all designed to confuse me, which was getting easier and easier even before i got dropped on my head. But it wasn’t just the standard remembering words and seeing patterns stuff that i’ve come to enjoy.
Oh no, this time they threw in this diabolical manual dexterity text that involved picking up teeny little pegs and plugging them into holes that they didn’t really want to go into. Grrrrrrr. Clearly i was having too much fun with the other stuff.
They’re really nice people and let me wheel the Segway in and plug it in for charging during the testing, which is a good thing because i would not have made it home otherwise. The best part of the visit, though, is that they’ve redecorated with a 3×4′ video screen displaying some spectacular graphics that fit their mission.