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I took a memory test and these were the results..."Have you been ill lately or feeling depressed or are you experiencing any new stress? If you have noticed any unusual memory problems, you may want to ask your doctor what you can do to improve memory." lol...well yes I have been feeling ill lately.
He just told me the names of about six items, then asked me about a minute later if I could recall any of them. I could only remember one...and I really did try hard. That is fairly typical of my ability to remember things short-term. I have to write everything down during the day if there are things I need to remember.
If I don't write down the instructions doctors give me, I completely forget what they said to me by the time I leave the office. Yet I can remember things from months ago very well sometimes.
Because of this fact we also sometimes feel insecure about our memory/intellect etc., and I was told by a professional medic that this insecurity is only a result of suffering from an incurable chronic disease.
Every person, young or old, sick or healthy, has sometimes problems with their memory
and patients suffering from an incurable disease often feel "overcrowded"
with their thoughts and priorities concerning the best possible for future treatments and how to combine our career despite suffering from an incurable unpredictable chronic disease etc.
Whe Ellen could not remember the words she was told during an "medical memory examination" she was possibly overcrowded with much more important issues than remembering these words and besides,
perhaps she was not well enough or relaxed enough on that particular moment to remember these words, because in her mind she may have had much more important issues to think about.
When RichiD forgot what the doctor said, it could be that the doctor was perhaps "just talking without saying anything particular" and there was nothing really important for her to remember what the doctor said.
Some doctors are essentially pretty helpless when they are confronted with a patient suffering from SLE/MCTD and I have in the past come across some doctors who were "talking like politicians" by talking without saying anything and and there was nothing worthwhile to remember in what they said.
The point I try to make is not to feel too insecure because of our suffering from an incurable chronic disease which disables us on many occassions without anyone even being able to properly diagnose what is going wrong or what sort of flare-up we are suffering at that particular time.
Good luck from Kristina.