saw the neurologist

This was a somewhat odd visit. The three previous times I saw Dr. AbdelRazek, they had me arrive half an hour early, so an assistant could do some low-tech neurology tests before I saw the doctor.

This visit, they had me arrive half an hour early, and the assistant took my vital signs and asked what medications I'm currently taking, then took me back to the waiting room until the doctor was ready. I had to ask him for the low-tech neurology tests, but when I said yes, I wanted him to do them, he sent someone into the exam room when he was done talking to me.

The doctor had started by asking me a few general questions about mood and activity. I told him that I'm still staying home a lot, because of Covid. He said he was surprised that I'm still doing that, and doesn't think I need to be. This surprised me.

He seemed to have two reasons for giving that advice. One is that he has "30 or 40" other patients on Ocrevus, who have reduced their precautions significant, and none of them have become seriously ill. The other is that, and I quote, "you have to live your life." What he advised was to keep masking indoors if I'm not eating or drinking, but he thinks I should eat in restaurants (the first example I gave of something I'm still not doing), and if I go to a party, mask most of the time, but it would be fine to take the mask off to eat or drink.

I'm not sure how much of my doctor saying "you have to live your life" is that, like a lot of people who say that, he is tired of the pandemic, and how much is that he's balancing mental health and depression against infection. But if it is a mental health thing, he could have been a lot clearer.

I miss in-person socializing, and if the three of us agree it's safe, I would like to have some friends visit, or go see other people. But eating in restaurants doesn't feel like a good use of our (notional) risk points.

Another small oddity: they had me fill out a questionnaire in the waiting room. It was mostly about my moods over the past two weeks, but they also asked about falls any time in the previous year. I said that "yes," I have been injured by a fall in the past twelve months, and nobody asked me about that.

Duolingo: interface changes and tech support

A couple of days ago, Duolingo (on the web) went from expecting me to enter my answers either with a keyboard or via "word bank," saving its state from my previous session, to word bank only. Last week, if I was using the keyboard it would occasionally offer "use word bank" and vice versa.

kaberett posted about this on their journal, so I knew it wasn't just something about my settings. After poking around the "help" pages, I put in a tech support request, asking them to either go back to making keyboard the default; make keyboard/word bank an option on the "settings" screen; or at least put back the use keyboard/use word bank at the bottom of individual questions.

Tech support sent me a poorly written reply (below) and, better, when I logged in earlier today, they seemed to have reverted the changes.

"You may see some changes when translating from your learning language to your base/UI language. We removed the toggle when translating from learning language to base language, but you can still type your answer on web. Simply start typing and the word in the word bank will be automatically highlighted. You still should be able to type in your learning language. You will see a toggle for the keyboard to type free-form in the learning language."

I'm posting this here in case it's useful to other people, or if I want it in a few days.

I'm passing it along in case they fixed my defaults, and nobody else's.