What's happened since the book?

The book was published on February 12, 2018.  What was significant at that time was that I was nearing the one-year mark for the insulin trial that I'm on.  As described in the book, the trial lasts for 18 months.  One half of the trial subjects have the placebo, and one half of us have the real thing.  At the one-year mark, the secrecy ends, and everyone goes on the real thing for the remainder of the trial.

I'm past the one-year mark, but I still don't know which I've been taking.  They can't tell me until after I've had the one-year MRI, and there was some confusion about scheduling it.  So the MRI will be done (hopefully) on March 14.  We'll see what happens.

I'm hopeful that the MRI will show that my hippocampus volume is coming back.  A year ago, it was at the 1 percentile of the general population.  However, research has shown that regular exercise can cause hippocampus volume to actually increase, and I'm naturally very interested in this result.

Earlier this week, I went for one-year testing for the trial.  They administered a physical exam, administered cognitive testing, and tried to give me a lumbar puncture.  (They will be examining spinal fluid for beta amyloid and tau proteins.)

So the physical exam included blood work.  It covered many things, but it found that my clotting factor wasn't optimal.  This led to postponing the lumbar puncture.  They already had the IV in before they got the final results on the blood work and made the decision to postpone to March 15.  The hope is that the clotting factor issue was transitory, and we'll get better results of we try again.  As it turns out, March 15 is our son's birthday, and it will be good to be in Seattle then.  (Our three children, our daughter-in-law, and our granddaughter all live in Seattle, so these visits are also family events.)

So how did the cognitive testing go?  I did not have the spectacular results that I had in November, but this can be explained without blaming the disease.  The night before, I stayed up quite late in a fascinating discussion with our oldest son, and I was quite exhausted the next day.  I'd likely have done well if the testing had been done early in the morning, but it was after lunch.  I was not at peak alertness.  My sense was that I did not do terribly, but it wasn't like November.

My recollection is that, in the list of (I believe) 10 words, I recalled seven or eight.  Recall that, in 2015, when I was drilled repeatedly on three words, I could only recall one a few minutes later.  I have come a long way.