Is it worth getting tested for APD at this point in life?

Ok…I think I may have APD. I’ve been doing some reading up on it and think it might explain the problems I’ve been having for years. I’m just wondering if it’s worth getting tested now that I’m an adult. I’m actually a 27 year old who is currently in grad school. Since I obviously don’t have a large amount of money, I need to find out if it’s worth it. If I am diagnosed with it, is there even anything that can be done to help me? I can obviously talk with our disability resource center at school. I just don’t know if there’s much help they can give me. I guess let me give a quick background.

I’ve always had a very hard time separating sounds and making sense of words. I did absolutely horrendous in school with anything that had to do with a language. I could manage in English class, but that was because it required mainly just reading. Forget a foreign language. Anything verbal isn’t possible for me. Then in college after my first semester, my foreign language teacher suggested that I go talk to my counselor about getting a test done to see if I can even learn a foreign language. I did that bad! :roll:

They sent me to some person to get tested specifically on modern and foreign language aptitude. I scored in the whopping 15% on the modern language aptitude test. I scored on the lower end of average on both the memory and the auditory processing part. But the tester added to the auditory processing part that even though I have “adequate ability to synthesize separate sounds and syllables into words, she has considerable difficulty analyzing words into the correct sequence of sounds.” That’s the extent of my testing so far…which actually helped get me out of having to take a foreign language to graduate with my BA. :D

Until these last few months, I didn’t even know there was a thing called an auditory processing disorder. Reading about it makes so much of my life make sense. I have a very hard time understanding and separating words out of sounds. I often will have to ask a person to repeat even the simplest sentence. I usually will stop after three tries because the person always starts to get annoyed with me. I end up just nodding my head in agreement even though I have no clue as to what they said. :roll: I’m in my mid-twenties and my parents still yell at me when I say I don’t understand them. Since I have very sensitive hearing, they don’t believe me. Hearing is definitely not a problem for me. I in fact probably have over sensitive hearing.

I could go on and on about other symptoms, but what I described is what has been the hardest for me in life. It’s hard to have a conversation with someone if you don’t know what they are saying. And as far as I know, there isn’t a pill I can take to fix it. Is there even anything I can do? Or do I just have to continue using context and guessing half the words in a sentence?

So…is it worth me getting tested to find out for sure if I have APD and/or something else? This is all new to me, so any advice would be great.

Jennifer