I'm not as bad a person as this blog will make me sound..

I had yet another one of those ‘why are you telling me this?’ moments at work today. It was also one of those occasions where ‘always finding the humour in things’ is not necessarily the best policy.
I was in the canteen at lunchtime, sitting next to one of the more experienced till girls - a very nice lady in her fifties called Barbara, who decided to tell me all about her husbands ongoing battle with dementia.
“It gets worse by the day”, she explained, “Yesterday I went out to the car and found him sitting in the passenger seat in a rage. I asked him what the matter was and he said ‘some bastards moved the steering wheel’”
Now I see myself as a good listener, someone very sensitive to other people’s feelings, and quite empathic, but at this point I got an uncontrollable fit of the giggles. I couldn’t help picturing this poor confused man, whose mind is so addled by alzheimers that he can’t even remember which side of a car you get in to operate it, just sitting there in the drive getting angrier and angrier. The more I tried not to think about it, the more detail seemed to be added, and I really started to lose it. I picked up my cappucino to try to hide my mouth, but only succeeded in snorting into it and splashing the hot froth onto my lips. Now I was switching between yelps of discomfort from the scalding, and bursts of laughter caused by this image in my head. Tears of pain were mixing with tears of joy and I ended up apologising and rushing off to the toilet to compose myself.
It took a good ten minutes, and a lot of cold water from the tap, before I was able to calm myself down enough to emerge.
The rest of the day was spent in a bizarre meditation-like trance, as I desperately tried to shut the image out of my mind and just get through the day without collapsing again.

Barbara and I were on the same afternoon tea break as well. For some reason she chose not to sit with me.

RC 15-10-11