My New Best Friend

I made a friend today at clinical! Unfortunately my friend suffers from severe dementia.

Many of my interactions with my friend prior to today were brief and tense. I had heard that my friend liked to twist arms, bite, and lick and the thought of a person like that kind of made me nervous. Today however, I was in a strange mood because of the death of a patient I had worked with and my friend must have picked up on that. My friend clung to me all night and kept telling me that I was loved and how special I was.

Although my friend's speech pattern was very strange, I immediately picked up on things by the way it was said. Our communication kind of reminded me of how I interpreted my brother's speech when we were younger. I know that seems awful comparing my brother to a person with dementia, but bear with me.



Saul, my brother, used to talk in a roundabout way. Getting from one point to the next was a journey, but not always a linear one. To get from A to B, he might skip to H or P before implying B. He did not speak in word salad (unintelligible mixture of words and phrases) like my friend, but it was sometimes hard to tell what Saul was actually talking about.

Over the years, Saul has developed in so many ways and I have honed my skill of interpretation. It may be the fact that I am his sister, but most often I know exactly what he means when he says something unclear to others. Whatever the case may be, my friend today reminded me of one of the many reasons I love and miss my brother. I am now going to try and get over my homesickness with - you guessed it - sleep.