Counting Backward by Seven

Rebecca E MacDonell-Yilmaz1,2

  • 1The Warren Alpert School of Medicine at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island rmacdonellyilmaz@gmail.com.

Annals of Family Medicine
|November 10, 2020
PubMed

I delayed my neurology rotation in medical school because I was trying to ignore the symptoms of dementia developing in my mother. They became painfully apparent when I saw my parents less frequently after I moved away for residency, and finally had to be addressed when I had a child of my own and felt unsafe having her care for him. Through my experiences with her and in my training in palliative care and oncology, I have learned that tools like the Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE) and Functional Assessment Staging Test (FAST) can only tell us so much; the true measure of a patient's decline can be found in the patient's and family's own story.

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