Frustrating communication

Hi all!
I’m currently doing my Neuro Outpatients placement.
This week I saw a patient who was a new admission to the neuro outpatient clinic. The patient had a L MCA infarct approx 7 months ago and was a late addition to my case load and I hadn’t had a chance to read over his medical notes before seeing him. Because of this, I had no idea of his history and what to expect. When I finally met the pt and started chatting, I was faced with a person grunting and gesturing at me in an attempt to tell me that he couldn’t talk. The pt had only mild receptive aphasia and could understand simple instructions, however he had severe expressive aphasia and was unable to communicate other than indicating yes or no through nodding his head. Even then, his yes and no answers seemed all over the place and not at all consistent which made it really hard to get a clear picture of what was really going on. My subjective Ax was pretty much non existent and my objective was very sketchy. Some Ax such as tone and ROM were relatively normal to complete, however the pts physical responses and facial expressions to this had to be monitored closely, rather than relying on a verbal response to stop. Other Ax was seemingly almost impossible.
This whole process had to be done so slowly to be as accurate as possible and was extremely long and yet at the end of it all I felt like I had gotten nowhere and had more questions than answers which left me feeling extremely frustrated and useless…
Later that day I was buying lunch at the cafeteria and saw the same pt eating lunch with his wife, daughter and 3 of his grandchildren. They were all chatting, laughing and looked like a happy family having a nice lunch together. As I watched this family, my patient looked like he was really happy to have so many family members around him and yet I couldn’t help but feel like he was missing out on something. He had so much going on around him and he couldn’t contribute at all… all he could do was sit there and listen.
I thought back to how I had felt at the end of our session that morning and how frustrated I was with the situation… then I thought, how must this guy feel? 7 months ago this guy was a seemingly normal, happy, working man who could interact with his family and environment around him. Now all he could do was nod his head and grunt. At that point my morning didn’t seem so bad after all.