SLIDER

Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Wisdom from the workplace

People with brain injuries say and do the darndest things. Sometimes it is more in the delivery than in the actual words or actions themselves. It's one of the reasons I love my profession, and I don't want to forget the specifics of these subtle nuances.


I was administering a naming test, to evaluate whether or not a person is having "anomia," or a word-finding problem often caused my stroke or brain injury, to a woman, let's call her D. The picture was of a protractor, as in the math tool. She couldn't think of the word, although she knew what the drawing depicted.

"Yeah, well, I'm not measuring any angle with anything," she said, frustrated that she could not come up with the word.



At another appointment with the same woman, we were discussing getting back into exercise. The recreational therapist had suggested D take up swimming.

"It's an awful lot of trouble. You have to get in the pool. Get out of the pool."



One wise patient, who really had no wits about him, cleared from the fog for a moment to offer me a pearl of wisdom.

"You have to learn how to be apart before you can get it together."

Rather wise of him, this grasshopper thinks.



Today I instructed a patient, who had fallen off a ladder just two weeks prior, to journal about his day.

"Start by writing today's date."

He wrote: "today's date."

Now THAT is what we mean by concrete thinking.



The same ladder-falling patient referred to his confusion as "being behind the 8 ball." I'm not exactly sure what this means, but it seemed rather prophetic.



And on another occassion, with my same friend, we were working on an odd-man-out semantic task. He was instructed to identify the picture that didn't belong. This particular scene depicted a banana, an apple, a lemon, and a carrot. I was looking for him to say that the carrot didn't belong because it was a vegetable, and the other three pictures were fruits. He correctly identified all the images as "edibles," but failed to see which one might not quite belong. Using my best scaffolding skills, I proceeded to isolate each picture.

Me: "Is a banana a fruit?"
Him: "Well, yes, I believe a banana is an edible fruit."
Me: "That's correct. Good. Now, is a lemon a fruit?"
Him: "I believe a lemon is an edible fruit."
Me: "Alright, so is an apple a fruit?"
Him: "Now I wasn't grown on an orchard or anything, so I don't know."

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