I went in at the crack of dawn this morning for my mid-year checkup for the Diabetes Prevention Program. In past years, the mid-year exam has been a simple fasting blood test and a couple of questionnaires to fill out. But this year they added physical and cognitive testing to the mix. And the tests were clearly aimed at people a lot older than me, making me feel remarkably young and, dare I say it, spry.
For example, one test timed how long I took to walk 15 feet. Another test was getting up out of a chair without using my hands. And then asking me if I felt safe trying to do it 5 times in a row. The most fun one was, after passing 3 carefully graded simple balance tests, being asked if I felt safe trying to stand on one leg for 60 seconds. I did actually start to lose my balance at one point and had to wildly readjust - and I could see the interviewer getting ready to catch me - but somehow I managed to get back to equilibrium and lasted the rest of the 60 seconds with no problem.
The cognitive tests were things like naming as many animals as I could in a certain timeframe, then giving as many words as I could think of beginning with the letter "f". (I actually was a bit slow on that one and kept thinking of more f-words all the way home.) Then there was a word retention test. So I did the usual thing of drawing pictures in my mind, and now I can't shake this image of a kitchen, where a woman is serving CABBAGE soup with a LADLE and her husband is reading a NEWSPAPER and a DICTIONARY and trying to decide between COFFEE or COCOA (both of which are made from BEANS), or JUICE or TEA to drink, while a PAN of ASPARAGUS is on the stove and a SIEVE full of PEACHES is sitting in the sink.
