NIH Stroke Scale - "scoring a stroke"

When I entered the Emergency Room after suffering a stroke, and having partial paralysis and some slurred speech, I wondered why they kept asking me such obscure questions. There seemed to be no particular rhyme or reason to their questioning, and it took until now, some two years later, to understand just what they were doing.

They were following the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Stroke Scoring methodology. This is often called the NIH Stroke Scale, and it is a scale from 1 to 30 on how severe your stroke is at the time it is evaluated.
A score of 25 or more means that your stroke is considered "severe", and a score of less than 4 is considered minor in comparison.

The major things they look for in this evaluation are:

• Level of consciousness . Scored from 0 (keenly alert) to 3 (unresponsive physically and mentally).
• Asking what month it is and what age you are. Score a 0 if you answer both correctly, and 1 each for a wrong answer to either question.
• Open and close your eyes, and clench with your non-affected hand. Again, 0 if you do both, 1 each if you cannot do either.
• Test your gaze with your eyes. The doctors will have a score of 0 if everything is normal, and 1 or 2 depending on what they find.
• There are a couple of other visual tests they run, also scoring from 0 (normal) to 2.
• They will measure facial paralysis (scale 0 to 2).
• On a scale of 0 (normal) to 4, they will measure both your arm and leg movement/paralysis.
• They will measure ataxia or your ability to coordinate movement - by touching your finger to your nose and to an outstretched point (like the doctor's finger) - maybe do the same with your leg as well. Measure 0 to 2.
• The doctors will test your sensory perception - applying a small prick to your affected limbs. Measure 0 to 2.
• They will run a couple of tests on your speech. Is it slurred - how severe? Are you comprehensible and do you comprehend?  The first is measured 0-2, the second 0-3.
• Finally, they will evaluate how attentive you are. Do you suffer from neglect to your surroundings? Are you "out of it"? Score 0-2 again.

So this is how they evaluated me - I have no idea what my score was, but by my reckoning, it must have been somewhere around 10 - considered mild by these standards. As luck would have it, I suffered another (or perhaps a continuation) stroke a couple of weeks later, when my speech was affected - so I could probably add another 4 or 5 to the score.