One day while I was in the office catching up on some paperwork I had a phone call from someone I trained with. She told me that one of her neighbours had just been transferred the hospital where I worked after having a brain tumour removed. The operation had left her totally blind and she was struggling to adjust to this.
When I went to meet the woman she was a real character, very down to earth and she had a great sense of humour. She liked regular visits so that she could be taken downstairs to have a fag. On one of these occasions we were sitting under a tree in the nice weather. She was talking about a particular nurse and I couldn’t get who she was talking about. She kept telling me I did know her. In the end I just said “what did she look like?” At that point we both burst out laughing and she quite rightly called me a “Silly cow” The strange thing was it lead on to a good conversation. She asked me if she looked blind and I was able to tell her what she needed to know. She also asked what I looked like and I gave her permission to feel me after I had given her a description. She then got tearful about all that she had lost with her sight like not seeing her children as adults, never seeing her grand children, needing to move into adapted accommodation. I sat with her until the tears dried up and then we talked about the fact that she was experiencing a bereavement and what she was grieving was her sight.
She phoned me a few times after leaving the hospital. She told me that she felt that day was a turning point for her and the day she started to accept what had happened. It’s so good to know that positive things can come out of even the most inappropriate comments.
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