Today is my second day back at the office. I came in and worked a full day on Friday, had the weekend off and am now back today. I won’t be back in until Wednesday, however. Tomorrow I will spend most of the day talking with neuropsychologists and completing the Halstead-Reitan Neuropsychological Test Battery. Yeah. Six hours of testing to make sure that my brain works correctly.

The pessimistic side of me is looking at this test battery and saying to myself, “No good news can come of this.” I mean I’m already back at work and doing pretty well with that. I’ve made some good strides in the other areas. I haven’t seen anything overly strange with respect to my reasoning ability or general cognition. I have noticed an increase in anomia — difficulty in finding the right words or names – and am working to rectify that as best I can. But that is really about it as far as the things the test is looking at goes.

The optimistic side of me looks at the test and says to myself, “Well, at least we’ll know and be able to maybe treat it or at least work around it more easily.” For example, if the test were to show that I had suffered a loss in my ability to concentrate or my short term memory, my therapists explained that I might teach myself ways to work around that – writing things down and the like.

I’m still grappling with what has happened to me. At the same time I get angry about the damage, the strange behaviors – the missing days! – the same time I get angry about that, I struggle to try and understand what it means for me moving forward.

I just want things back the way they were before. – And I know that’s something I can’t have.