After completing the prior post, I went back through the blog. During the experiment, I ceased posting; I wanted the date of my last post. What I discovered speaks to blog utility, the value of this written effort as an assist to recovery.
I believed the experiment started on Saturday September 26th. It actually commenced on Friday September 25th in response to a crisis generated by this post. I was able to validate this fact by correlating cellphone walk data with the blog posts to provide an accurate picture of events from the immediate past. Without the blog as a temporal record, my problems with recollection would not have been discovered. The data available to me, and the associated posts, are as follows:
Date Footsteps Miles Day Description
September 24th 16,009 7.16 Thursday Hill walk, 5 reps
September 25th 22,943 9.87 Friday Dr. D and volunteer work
September 26th 18,648 8.43 Saturday Experiment Day 1
September 27th 18,699 8.21 Sunday Experiment Day 2
September 28th 36,102 16.42 Monday Experiment Day 3
September 29th 18,289 8.31 Tuesday Experiment Day 4
September 30th 17,685 8.25 Wednesday Experiment Day 5
Totals: 148,375 66.65
There is no direct correspondence between footsteps and miles walked. The footstep recorder is operating at all times when the phone is powered on and being carried. It records every step taken. The mileage figure is derived from a second app which only records when triggered. It is started on departure from the house, is paused when I arrive at work, and is resumed on departure from work.
On September 24th I was in minor crisis. An online brain health test showed no improvement over the prior year. This was a shock. I was confident I performed well on the test. I am also confident I have been able to undertake actions this year that were impossible last year. I believe I have experienced considerable improvement even though the brain health test gave no objective confirmation of this fact. I am also aware that I very much want to believe in my improvement. If there has been no improvement, then I have wasted a year and a great deal of shoe leather. On September 23rd I committed another embarrassing error and awareness of this prior error likely contributed to the sense of crisis on the 24th.
On September 25th, I met with Dr D at 1300. After leaving her office, I proceeded to my volunteer job. The description of “babble” described in the post dated September 26th, actually refers to events from the night of the 25th of September. When I am in crisis, I will resort to making a blog post in order to “sort things out,” and obtain a sense of control and an understanding of events. I know I was in crisis on the 24th and 25th.
It has taken me over three hours to sort out events from the past week. If I rely on memory, everything is a blur, a sort of single prolonged day with no temporal separation of events on recall. Memory events appear to be scrambled and lacking association with an event timeline.
A second time related problem comes to mind. When meeting with Dr D on Friday, I ended up talking almost non-stop and was surprised to learn that the session had come to an end. I had a laundry list of issues to discuss but there was no real discussion. I simply iterated through the list. I need to apologize to Dr D for this.
Note
There is another time issue. The period from February 24th until today has flashed past like a gunshot. I know I have performed a great deal of work in this period but the period appears collapsed, or telescoped together.
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This is Section 2 of a four part series of posts. The other posts may be found here: