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In light of my personal history, I count myself fortunate not just to be alive, but to have been able to pass an even simpler version of the cognitive test that the president has been touting his performance on. https://www.salon.com/2020/07/23/trump-admits-to-fox-news-that-the-memory-questions-were-the-difficult-part-of-his-cognitive-test_partner/
In light of my personal history, I count myself fortunate not just to be alive, but to have been able to pass an even simpler version of the cognitive test that the president has been touting his performance on. https://www.salon.com/2020/07/23/trump-admits-to-fox-news-that-the-memory-questions-were-the-difficult-part-of-his-cognitive-test_partner/
I suffered sudden cardiac death during a tennis match in November of 2007. Such events are almost always fatal. I survived only because a redundant ambulance happened to have been dispatched half an hour earlier to the scene of an auto accident near where I’d been playing.
Sudden cardiac death deprives the brain of oxygen, which probably explains why I was unable to form new memories during the first several days following this incident. I can only imagine my family’s profound relief when that problem suddenly seemed to vanish on day four.
Still unresolved at the time, however, was whether I might have suffered any enduring cognitive deficits of a more subtle sort. To see where I stood, I went in January 2008 for a follow-up visit with the same neurologist who’d examined me in November.
During my hospital stay, he'd asked me whether I could remember three simple words—hat, shoe, and pen—that he’d told me to hold in mind a few minutes earlier. Family members tell me that I couldn’t recall any of them, or even that he’d asked me to hold three words in mind.
In the ensuing weeks, as evidence of my recovery continued to accumulate, my response to his question became a running joke in the family. One of my Christmas presents from my wife and our sons was a box labeled “the great triumvirate.
They asked me to guess what three things were in the box. Of course, I had no idea. When I opened it to find a Tilley hat, a Cross pen, and a tiny tennis shoe that my wife had molded out of clay, they explained that these were the three words the neurologist had asked me about.
On the morning before going for my January follow-up visit with the neurologist, I asked my wife to test me with three new words. “Tree, box, squirrel,” she said. Five minutes later, she asked whether I could recite them.
Before answering, I asked whether she could remember them. She could not. (As the president has said, this test is hard!) So I was relieved that I could recall them easily: “Tree, box, squirrel!” I said, feeling pleased with myself.
About fifteen minutes into my session with the neurologist later that day, he told me he was going to ask me to remember three words. It was all my wife and I could do to keep from cracking up when he used the same three words he had in November—hat, shoe, and pen!
Of course he would use the same words every time. How else could HE remember them? But when he asked whether I could recall them five minutes later, I momentarily drew a blank. A mounting sense of panic followed.
As an academic, as for a president, it is disadvantageous to be labeled as cognitively deficient. I was therefore profoundly relieved when the image of the hat, shoe, and pen from my Christmas gift box flashed before my eyes.
“Hat, shoe, pen,” I said confidently. Moments later, I left the clinic with a clean bill of health. I don’t know whether I earned it. But in the book I later wrote about the importance of chance events, we can’t claim credit for many of the good things that happen in our lives.
