In my second visit at Headway, the centre was quite empty, ranging from none to two users. As I found out, yoga just got cancelled for the day, so instead we folded calendars to send by mail to all members. It felt good, for me and a user, to do something useful for the rest of the community. Mr. X told me of lemonade he made and brang to Headway last week, and how he learned many new recipes since his injury. When the second user arrived, they both got very engaged in a conversation about hockey. Conversations were lively, but overall it made up for a very different experience than my first visit.
On my first visit, the group conversations I got complemented some of the issues we saw in class. An example is how challenging may it be to get back to work after TBI. Some members were trying to find a suitable job unsuccessfully; another was happy about her weekend job at a supermarket, for which the ride there was one and a half hours long from her home. She wished they could give her more hours, but she enjoyed being productive and self-providing. This is consistent with a study that showed a higher- subjective well being among people who succeeded to work after TBI than those who didn’t (O’Neill et al 1998).
Two of the members were training for the Paralympic Summer games. We talked about the training process, methods of para-athletic classifications (medical vs functional), as well as the inequalities between the Olympics and the Paralympics. Not only is the latter less covered by media, but I was surprised to be told that the COC compensate Canadian Olympic medallists with a cash prize, but not the Paralympic medallists–-even though they may need it more.
Canada got 16 medals in the Paralympics, entering the top three countries in number of gold medals.
But what impacted me the most was the move beyond group conversations. In my first visit, quickly some of the members trusted me as to have a more private conversation in which they shared with me their personal stories, their life pre-injury, the injury, and how everything changed since then. No amount of class can prepare one for these personal moments. It reminded me how important it is to enjoy life, as it comes. How false group dichotomies are: we will all be elderly, and it really takes some seconds to be in the position of members at Headway. Their issues are our issues: we can’t look away.
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