I am participating in Emory University’s Healthy Brain Study, part of the university’s Healthy Aging Study. While the Aging Study, the largest of its kind, uses on-line feedback to research multiple health issues related to aging, the Brain Study takes a more involved approach to researching the predictors of Alzheimer’s.

In other words, I can expect to be tested and prodded for about six hours ever two years. I like the idea that I have found a way to participate actively, not simply as Ralph’s caregiver. However, my first visit was frankly disconcerting: I HAD TO TAKE THE SAME COGNITIVE TEST RALPH HAS BEEN TAKING.

I remember Ralph’s first test experience. Or I remember my experience: sitting in a waiting room for two hours reading gossip magazines until he emerged slightly gray around the gills. On the drive home he complained about how much he hated the process while I put on a cheery, encouraging face aware he’d probably not done well. (He had not.)

Since then, every time we head to the Emory Brain Health Center, Ralph asks worriedly if he’s going to be tested. I have learned to say, ‘I don’t know,’ to avoid making him more anxious than he already is. I am told that he is always quite cheerful and communicative in the actual testing, but he leaves each visit saying he feels “disoriented,” and “more foggy than usual.”

I am always sympathetic. Or I try to be. I admit that I have grown just a teensy bit callous after hearing the same phrases over and over; a small, not nice part of me shrugs off his complaints, secretly thinking, It’s a test, get over it.

So there I was, only a few weeks after Ralph’s most recent test, sitting at a desk about to embark on my own mental examination. It didn’t help that the test giver and I actually knew each other slightly, having worked together on a hospital improvement project. Once the test began she was a neutral blank.

I started sweating at the first easy question. It didn’t help that I recognized I was facing the same slate of mental exercises that Ralph has faced, that I knew how many words he remembered in one exercise and how many mistakes he made in another and how much time he took to complete a third task.

I started strong but could feel myself tiring mentally as the tests wore on. My concentration wandered when it shouldn’t. I missed some obvious answers. I began to struggle. And in the follow-the-dots a-1-b-2, a test in which Ralph made two mistakes this year but none last year, I somehow skipped my last letter; not a good feeling even if I was at least twice as fast.

The Bottom Line: I WAS TAKING THE SAME COGNITIVE TEST RALPH HAS BEEN TAKING AND I DIDN’T LIKE IT ONE BIT.

I knew rationally that everyone who takes the test feels that she screwed up, and I knew I basically did okay. No matter. By the time I stumbled out into the daylight I felt, you guessed it, “disoriented” and “more foggy than usual.”

Not great feelings but an excellent wake up call. I felt  a new infusion of empathy for Ralph (and others in his situation). Most of us can laugh off our mental lapses—misplaced keys, names on the tips of our tongues—but Ralph goes into each test, lives each day, each minute, struggling against dark impenetrable holes that he feels deepening. Having had my little taste of fear, I admire his bravery (and the bravery of his fellow travelers in Alzheimer’s) all the more.