rose, umbrella, and fear

Here was my mentor, Dr. Anna, chatting with a patient.
I, standing in a nonthreatening distance, observed everything.

Actually I do not have the eye to observe everything yet.

Dr. Anna attended to each patient with great patience. It felt like that she became another person.
Looking at the patient, she was nodding and speaking slowly and smiling a lot.
Suddenly turning to me, she was commenting on the syndrome with her usual my so-called Toby-like speaking -- extremely fast, sharp, precise, with much more information than any listener is able to digest.

After four hours and four patients, I was totally wiped out. Even my stomach was too tired to cry hunger.

Each patient was unique of course. Dr. Anna had had to give up doing case studies in order to concentrate on the big picture of research on disorders.
However, there was one thing shared by all the patients we saw today. None of them could recall, after about a 10-minute delay, all of the 3 words.
When Dr. Anna asked whether they remembered the words, I repeated them in my head.
Somehow, I deeply wished them to pass this test. I was like "Come on, you can do it."

None of them could substrate 7 from 100 correctly, either. But math is always a different case. People in this culture somehow have very low self-esteem on math problems. Although this problem was as simple as 100 minus 7, they did not try to do it.
They did not have the motivation to pass a math test.
They did, however, often succeeded to tell Dr. Anna how much change would be correct when buying a 63-cent with a dollar bill.

But they did have desire to pass the word memory test. None of them passed.
The side-effect is that those words are now imprinted in my whatever cortical area.

In order to get rid of something, I write about it.
Bad idea this time.
I tried playing them into sensible and non-sensible sentences, which just made them more rooted in my head.
When my time comes, I will say the words even before the doctor asks me to remember them.

One of the patients was a holocaust surviver with a series of number marked on his arm.
Dr. Anna asked him what she could do to help him today. His answer was "the number".
If the number was so deep in his memory, no other life-irrelevant, unrelated, isolated words could occupy him.

I cannot do case studies either. Individuals are painfully fascinating.