- What were all the purposes of this appointment?
- What exactly are all the tests that you will run?
- What are the disqualifying factors?
As this procedure was not invasive I wasn't really concerned accept for one thing. Could this appointment exclude me as a candidate for surgery? The short answer was yes, but as it happened I had nothing to worry about.
So, what happened? First, we started with the general chit chat. I asked her my questions and she gave me a brief explanation of what we would do. From then on it was all testing. There were tests for my memory (both long and short), cognitive reasoning, IQ, problem solving, mental stability, and mental health. I was a little bit annoyed by this last section. She asked some very strong questions, such as "What do you think the worst thing that could happen is?" and "What will you do if the procedure doesn't work?" and then we explored these further in quite a lot of probing detail. She also didn't like my answer to the former, when I didn't acknowledge death as the worst thing that could happen. The fact is, the way I see it is I could have a stroke and live 40 years as a vegetable. She also didn't understand when I said I did not fear death. Don't get me wrong, I love life and I am not looking to hasten my demise or take ridiculous risks, but death doesn't scare me and I don't think she quite understood this. I also felt that this was covered by the clinical psychologist and I didn't really want to cover it again.
Anyway, at the end of it, I got the seal of approval to go ahead, and a full set of psychological benchmarks to compare against, God forbid something does go wrong with the surgery (which is the main reason why we did this). Now we are just a month out from my surgery I will take you through my checklist for getting ready in my next post. Until then, stay well:)
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