The Two Kinds of Decay

The Sixth Sense

The sixth sense is not psychic vision but proprioception, the perception of where the body is in space.

In October, during the first year of the disease, having already lost sensation, movement, and all my reflexes, I lost my sense of proprioception. Every night before sleep, my mattress folded into undulating spiral shapes and I stuck to the walls and somehow my head got to be five feet higher or lower than the rest of my twisted body. As long as it was dark, I stayed lost in imaginary space.

And so in October my neurologist added a proprioception test to my regular neurological exam.

This is what the book tells you: you have the patient close his eyes, and then you grab one of the patient’s big toes and bend it either up or down, and you ask the patient whether the toe has been moved up or down.

But the book doesn’t explain that the test is easy to cheat on. All you need to do is to feel the pressure on the big toe from the tester’s hand, and if the pressure’s on the top of the toe, then the toe’s been moved down, and vice versa.

So I told my neurologist that the test was useless, and that in a properly administered proprioceptive sense exam, the pressure on the top and the bottom of the toe must stay equal and consistent throughout, so there won’t be any clues from which to cheat.

After my neurologist learned that, the test was more fun, because I never knew how I’d do.