This one is a little different. Recently things have
been hard. I am the type of person who believes winning is of the uth most
importance, I hate losing. But over the past few months things haven’t been
going my way and I have lost more than my fair share of battles. I recently began
comparing myself to others, my friends are all beginning their professional
careers and are getting well paid for it. They have wonderful lifestyles and
live in exuberant locations. Me, I’m a 26 year old, underpaid assistant
psychologist. I live in the middle of nowhere, far away from friends and family….
I constantly say to myself that I need to change career, that I would receive a
much higher reward for my efforts elsewhere. Considering the amount of work I put
in, I would certainly already be successful in another field….
But then little things happen. When I go to work,
money leaves my thoughts. I can honestly, hand on heart say, I have never
looked at the clock and said “hurry up 5 o clock”. People’s lives are in my
hands, people self-harm in front of me every day. People who have a mother, a
daughter, a brother and who have been successful in their own lives……
I have been
spending time with a person with dementia (a progressive illness where a person’s
memory, language and other cognitive abilities slowly deteriorate, and there is
very little you can do to halt this progression; there is no cure). This guy
(let’s call him George, he’s 60 years of age) struggles to communicate with anyone,
has no idea where he is, sometimes he thinks he is at work. But at some level
(in my subjective opinion) George knows he is deteriorating and knows he is in
a mental health hospital. Because of this he can spend days with his head in
his hands slouched over in the corner of a room, highly depressed. His family
want nothing to do with him. George has no friends outside of hospital. He is
in hospital until he dies. George can say two words, “yes” and “no”…. So six
months ago I began to find out about this man, George likes art and David
Hockney. I started to spend time with him. All I did was sit with George and
talk about art. I used to bring in pictures of his favourite artist's work and
blabber on about what I liked about the picture, what it meant for me…. I began
to notice that over time, George’s reaction to me when I arrived to see him became
more emotional. He now cries when I enter his room. But for others, the big
improvement is George’s communication. He can now say full sentences, he
can ask for a drink when he’s thirsty (before this he used to beat the shit out
of people because he was dehydrated and didn’t have the ability to communicate
he wanted some water. It used to take up to 5 people to restrain him). He now
spends time painting. But for me the biggest improvement is that George doesn’t
spend his days hunched over in the corner of a room with his head in his hands,
and depressed. Instead he sits up proud… George wasn’t a patient referred to
me, just someone I took an interest in. All I did was stimulate his brain by
helping him to reminisce over art work and probably connected past times. This all
stimulated his long term memory, George’s cognition, and is probably why he is
now able to talk…. This all links to why he is now proud again, he was a
successful human being, a successful artist, and like me, a winner that hates
losing... Apparently dementia is a progressive illness..... It's the big things. I love what I do.
