Personality is sorta chimerical

A few days ago, our planned physical activity of the day was indoor basketball with a 5' tall plastic basket. Steve, my co-worker, who's a case manager with several of the TBI clients I work with, ran the show. He decided that to even things out, he'd split our group such that the two clients with motorized wheelchairs were on opposite teams, another usually wheelchair-bound client was on one of their teams with her non-motorized chair, then he pulled 3 extra chairs out of the equipment closet. Two clients who normally walk on their own took the first 2, and I evened out the teams by taking the 3rd chair.* I don't think I'd ever sat in a wheelchair. It was fun, and I'm glad I don't have to ride in a wheelchair normally.

I've still not read any clients' files, so I'm still creating my own ideas about what they're "like," what's illness, what's part of their former personality. I'm sure it's a relief for them to be somewhere that people _don't_ continually compare their pre- and post-incident selves. There are some general characteristics one finds such as speech problems (softer than normal and/or inarticulate and/or disconnected and/or nonsensical speech) or loss of certain inhibitions (quicker to anger, tendency to make inappropriate remarks of a sexual or non-tactful nature). But then I think that if I'd had an accident that robbed me of, say, the use of a side of my body, and made me talk funny, and meant I wasn't as smart anymore so my spouse no longer found me attractive enough to be intimate with me, I'd probably be grumpy and quicker to anger than normal, too. And maybe have lowered inhibitions because I quit caring about social consequences because my deference to them didn't seem to help me be accepted by the world at large, anyway, now that I was disabled and looked down on or pitied or ignored.

One client seems to have vocabulary straight out of a John Hughes script. Her response to most things said to her is to grin widely, wave her hand, and say "I'm so sure! I'm so sure!" Did she talk like this before whatever-it-was injured part of her brain? Was she always such a cheerful person? Did her grumpy wires get disconnected altogether? Or the client who makes continual inappropriate flirtatious comments to me--maybe he's always objectified women in this way? Is that just his injury talking? My boss leads group discussions about once a month on communication skills and uses that phrase with the clients, telling them that what they said wasn't their best self, it was their injury talking. It's great they're learning explicitly to use other parts of their brain to inhibit certain behaviors. And this reminds me what a fragile construct self and personality are.

What if I had to ride around in a wheelchair as my only means of locomotion, and couldn't think or talk as fast? That would sort of be someone else, except they would have my not-as-functional body and some percentage of my memories.

*If you did the math, you realized that's not many clients. On any given day we have between 14 & 21 clients present. After the lunch that takes up the first hour, they're split into two groups, red & blue. One does the cognitive game/activity while the other does the physical, then they switch, then everyone goes through free-weights/sitting/arm/leg/standing exercises at the same time in the two groups in two different rooms. That day, the client who should've been in the wheelchair I took was still eating her lunch. She typically takes about an hour to eat the meal that most people consume in 10 to 15 minutes.