SSI Disability

I went to the neuropsychologist for testing and was diagnosed with Neurocognitive Disorder- Moderate. The whole process was fascinating, because I have studied cognitive psychology and recognized a lot of the concepts. I helped conduct reseach experiments while in school, and so it was interesting to actually be the one taking the tests!

My results and comments were as follows:

- Attention: my encoding score was low- encoding being the range of new information that someone can take in at one time.
- Executive Functions. This refers to skills that are important for goal- directed behavior and problem solving. This includes skills in planning, the ability to use organized search strategies, to monitor performance and correct errors. Also the ability to resist the impulse to respond to irrelevant information when completing a task. The tests showed that I'm generally disorganized in daily life in terms of problem solving- due to being unable to plan ahead and stop and think about problems at hand. This is a gross understatement. I simply cannot and do not plan anything.
- Learning and Memory. I have no problems encoding verbal information, but have trouble with retrieval. I had very delayed recal abilities, even when given clues of previous information. I will never be on Jeopardy.
- Language/ Verbal abilities. I have low performance in the ability to quickly and accurately retrieve and apply language, colors and numbers, and overall fluency.
- Visual/ Spatial and Sensory Motor Functioning. This number was in the low range, suggesting that when given multiple visual information, I have difficulty distinguishing similar shapes.

Overall, I have encoding issues, mild processing issues, and executive function difficulties. This suggests that I struggle with processing information the first time I hear it. This can influence comprehension, especially with boring tasks. Learning is a problem, because comprehending new information is more time consuming. I also struggle with resisting impulses and considering consequences before I act. Moreover, planning is a problem because I consistently underestimate the time needed to complete a task and it's level of difficulty. I may have good ideas but be unable to express them adequately. I also have problems keeping information in active/ working memory- something that is needed to sustain attention. This causes forgetfulness and becoming overwhelmed by large amounts of information. Finally, I have problems with initiation, i.e. getting started. While intentions are good, this puts me at risk for being labeled lazy and unmotivated.

* apparently my Perceptual Reasoning skills were superior, meaning that I am excellent at solving non verbal problems and working with visual information such as designs and pictures. At least i have some good results!

Everything the neuropsychologist found reconfirmed what I already knew- I have a hard time with reasoning skills and learning new concepts. These are two things which are essential to being an effective and safe medical provider. I will need more time to process results and make diagnostic decisions. This is almost impossible to do with the current standard of 15-minute appointments. No one wants to hire someone who is so slow at their job. Plus, medical information is always changing, and so it will become increasingly difficult to keep abreast of all that new information.

With these results, I beleive that I have a good shot at getting disability. I told my doc exactly why I was doing the study and she wrote my results summary to reflect how I am unable to do the job that I went to school for due to chemotherapy. Now I just need to start applying- a daunting task that requires some skill in "initiation"


On another note- my latest CT was negative!