So who's normal?

MARIE: We went up to town a few days ago for the results of Jon’s neuropsych evaluation. Not good news, as he was basically presented with a long list of things that aren’t as easy for him as they should be – like planning, executing plans, staying on track, analyzing, evaluating, structuring, those kinds of useful skills. On the other hand, he scored better for verbal skills than he expected, so that’s something at least.

Of course you can’t test whether someone’s cognitive skills have declined if you don’t know what they were like before, so the psychologist started by taking a thorough educational and work history, from which she concluded that Jon was “originally a highly intelligent male”. A rather surreal factoid is that his mental capacities are now approaching bog-standard normal, which represents a significant loss for him.

There are a couple more tests to come in the next month or two, a fresh MRI scan to compare to the one he had four years ago in Holland, and a spinal fluid sample to be tested for the devil knows what. I believe this is mainly to exclude a few unlikely unpleasantnesses. And to be honest, sufficient unpleasantness has already hit the fan. Jon is now the not-so-proud owner of a box of Exelon drug patches labeled “against Parkinson’s disease with dementia”.

He’s only been using the patches for three days so we have no idea yet whether it will help, but at least it looks like he’ll be spared the rashes that force some people to stop. It seems you start out on half dose for a month to see how well you tolerate the drug, and if no ill effects appear, the dose is then doubled. So it’ll be a while before we can report on the effect.

Jon is taking the whole thing very calmly which I admire while it also puzzles me and maybe just ever so slightly concerns me. I’m not as resigned as he is and tend to get a bit teary-eyed – occasionally also in public, which is marvelously embarrassing.

Anyway, this last bit of bad news prompted me to call our local authority to ask them to come and assess the situation with a view to offering us help of some sort. To their credit, they decided to treat the matter as urgent and are sending someone round in a few days. Whether they will offer help that comes anywhere near to being helpful remains to be seen. I’m kind of expecting an uphill battle.