I think back to my 20-year-old self and my sister, lost in her imagined worlds, and I feel compassion for us both<\/p>\n
When my sister was 21, she was diagnosed with dementia. She had survived a malignant brain tumour diagnosis when she was 10, but her cancer was inoperable and sat directly on her hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for memory formation.<\/p>\n
My sister moved in and out of what I would call \u201creality\u201d. She spent days talking to people I couldn\u2019t see, laughing at jokes I couldn\u2019t hear. I would cajole her into playing Scrabble with me, and after a couple of hours she might say something \u201cnormal\u201d, like, \u201cHow are you, Jackie?\u201d She just needed mental stimulation, I would think. If I could play Scrabble with her every day, she would come back to me.<\/p>\n
Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I think back to my 20-year-old self and my sister, lost in her imagined worlds, and I feel compassion for us both When my sister was 21, she was diagnosed with dementia. She had survived a malignant brain tumour diagnosis when she was 10, but her cancer was inoperable and sat directly on her hippocampus, … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38889","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38889","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38889"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38889\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}