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‘A brain injury is robbing me of my good friend’

May 14, 2018

Lyn is saddened that her friend is losing his memory. Source: Pexels

I have a photo, taken a few months back, of a special mate of mine. It is typical of the relationship we have had.

I met him in 1997 at an NLP course. I was working in distance education and had some fall-out with the education department, which wasn’t unusual — I was always fighting for the rights of some of my charges.

I only decided to do the course because there was not going to be anyone from education in attendance. I was not in the greatest space, but this crazy man insisted on making me laugh and we immediately became friends. We did quite a few activities together and I got to know that he had been a successful corporate coach but had suffered a closed brain injury some years back and had lost everything. He seemed so knowledgeable and I wondered how he was coping with this horrible state of affairs.

Then something really strange happened. On the last day of the very long course, we were asked to note the changes we had made and what was our next move. In a flash I made a decision. I had turned 55 and at that time I could take early retirement. I turned to my mate and told him that I was going to retire and start my own training company. I then stunned him by asking him if he would join me. He was taken aback and said he had lost all of his clients and didn’t know whether he had anything to offer. My gut feeling was that he had a great deal to offer but to appease his doubts, I went with him to see his neuro-psychologist to find out if I was expecting too much. The neuro-psychologist was extremely positive and assured me that my mate still had big islands of information and this would be really good for him. He did warn me that this would be the extent of my mate’s knowledge as he would never be able to take on new information. Boy, did we prove him wrong.

Thus began some of the hardest but best years of my life. I was pretty naive to begin with as I felt that our joint expertise in training would get us through, but then we found that we had to be a registered training organisation if we were going to do any training. This is where miracles began to happen. I found if I put information down on a flow chart, my mate cottoned on pretty quickly and it was largely due to his persistence that we did become a registered training organisation (RTO) specialising in workplace training and assessment.

Working with my mate was an absolute joy. He was always upbeat and incredibly funny. I had no idea what was going to happen next. I remember one morning he arrived late to a public training session looking extremely dishevelled — unshaven and shirt untucked. It was so unusual for him. I was feeling a little peeved as he kept on the guise of being quite belligerent and I began to feel his brain damage was catching up. It was only at morning tea he confessed that he was making a point about how we are perceived when we are training, which was quite pertinent to the subject we were working with. Everyone went into hysterics and from then on, I knew to expect the unexpected. We were a great team and I’m sure his personality got us through many doors that a woman on her own may not have achieved at that time.

I was devastated when he fell in love with a lady who lived up on the coast and the distance became a problem we found hard to navigate, so we agreed to sever our business relationship and I went on alone. He was my best mate and I missed him so much.

He is now rapidly losing his memory. He still remembers me, and his wife sometimes prompts him to call me, then two days later he has looked at his list of instructions and rings me again without any memory of our previous call. In his usual style, he still manages to make me laugh. I am so grateful for our friendship and all that he taught me.