Yesterday I went to a nursing home...
...and visited with a sweet little lady who appeared to be so out of it that no one ever speaks to her. I found a few of them who were in such bad shape that you would never think that they had any mind left to them but they absolutely have as much of a mind as anyone else. They simply have one disease or another that renders them either incapable of speaking or has left them with such slow response time that they appear less than “intelligent”. How sad that is, even the most talkative of these folk have a hard time getting anyone to speak to them, the slower ones have pretty much no one to even look twice at them.
They line the halls of the nursing homes and sit in their wheelchairs as people hustle past them on their way to whatever job it is they have to do. The jobs are so overwhelmingly tough that the employees have little time to speak to these folks even if they wanted to.
The little lady that I spoke to answered every question I asked her appropriately, but it took her a while to form the words in her mind and get them out of her mouth. Most people don’t wait for her to answer, they just assume that she can’t and go about their business. She had a picture of a very handsome Navy officer sitting on her bedside table and when I asked her who it was, she said it was her husband. She told me how she would drive coast to coast to meet his ship at various times in their marriage and I told her that I would have driven across the country to meet such a handsome man and she laughed so hard I thought that she would bust a blood vessel. Her sense of humor was perfectly intact, yet she sits in that wheelchair, lined up along the sides of the halls with 20 other old people, all waiting for something, or someone, who will never come. Death is pretty much the only visitor that these folks can count on.
Another woman lies in bed everyday, the victim of a stroke that has left her speechless, yet her mind takes in everything around her. You can see by the expressions that she makes with her eyes that this lady understand everything that anyone says to her. But when the staff came in to “turn” her, they treated her like a sack of potatoes that need to be rolled every so often. If they pulled on an arm and hurt her, I could see the look of pain in her eyes yet since she couldn’t speak, the staff just kept on doing what they were doing, speaking to each other about their latest date or the last class that they took, totally unaware and unconcerned with whether or not this lady was comfortable.
The care that these folks receive consists, at best, of being turned from side to side every two hours and kept dry...maybe. The urine odor in the halls told me that very few of them stayed dry for any length of time. The little lady with the handsome husband was sitting in the hall asking to be taken to the bathroom and when I told someone, they responded, “She always says that, we just took her.” Well, I took it upon myself to take this lady to the bathroom and she wasn’t kidding. She had done her best to hold it in, not wanting to sit in her own waste. But no one would listen to her because, “She always says that.”
What a sorry state of affairs it is when we warehouse the folks that built out country to be the great nation that it is, only to toss them in these places to rot away. The populations of residents living in homes such as this one is growing larger and larger as the baby boomers age and develop one debilitating illness or another. If we don’t do something to make the lives of these folks better soon, we are destined to end up in the same places and the same sad situations.
I’ve worked in nursing homes for a good part of my nursing career and things are not getting much better since I started caring for them while I was a teenager. The people are few their meals through tubes or by spoons because the pureed meats and vegetables are all that their toothless mouths can handle. Today they had pumpkin pie for dessert, but that pie was in a bowl and looked more like pudding than anything else. Their days consist of sitting in wheelchairs lined up like cattle or lying in beds, with the only activity they experience is when they are turned from side to side to prevent bedsores.
I think that the richest country in the world should be able to find a better way to care for it’s elderly. There are other cultures and other times that treated they cared for their parents and grandparents with dignity and considered them a valued member of their families, keeping them at home where they were assured that they would be cared for with love by the people who loved them the most. In our society, we toss them in these homes to be cared for by strangers because they are just not convenient as we go about our busy lives. We seem to consider it much more important to go out and earn money so that we can buy things that make us feel as though we are important. No one seems to consider the fact that if we live long enough, we, too, will be in one of these places because we have not taught our own children that the elderly are anything more than a burden.
So many of the families of these people come to the home, not to visit, but to bitch at the staff over every little thing that isn’t to their own liking. Somehow, this behavior makes these family members feel as though they have done something for their parents when all they have done is assuage their own guilt feelings and convince the staff that they don’t really want to be bothered with these folks, they just want to make it appear as though they care. If they truly did care, they would take these poor people home and take care of them themselves. They fool no one but themselves.
If people could care for their own families years ago, surely we could do it with all the modern conveniences we have now. But, materialism and selfishness has replaced the love and concern that we once had for the people who cared for us when we were at our most helpless.
I had a patient once who had survived the Bataan Death March in WWII. He told me that he would rather go through that again than to be left in a nursing home. That’s pretty damn pathetic.
I will be going back to that place to visit my new friend. It’s a shame her family doesn’t realize the joy that this lady and those like her have to offer.
Meg
...and visited with a sweet little lady who appeared to be so out of it that no one ever speaks to her. I found a few of them who were in such bad shape that you would never think that they had any mind left to them but they absolutely have as much of a mind as anyone else. They simply have one disease or another that renders them either incapable of speaking or has left them with such slow response time that they appear less than “intelligent”. How sad that is, even the most talkative of these folk have a hard time getting anyone to speak to them, the slower ones have pretty much no one to even look twice at them.
They line the halls of the nursing homes and sit in their wheelchairs as people hustle past them on their way to whatever job it is they have to do. The jobs are so overwhelmingly tough that the employees have little time to speak to these folks even if they wanted to.
The little lady that I spoke to answered every question I asked her appropriately, but it took her a while to form the words in her mind and get them out of her mouth. Most people don’t wait for her to answer, they just assume that she can’t and go about their business. She had a picture of a very handsome Navy officer sitting on her bedside table and when I asked her who it was, she said it was her husband. She told me how she would drive coast to coast to meet his ship at various times in their marriage and I told her that I would have driven across the country to meet such a handsome man and she laughed so hard I thought that she would bust a blood vessel. Her sense of humor was perfectly intact, yet she sits in that wheelchair, lined up along the sides of the halls with 20 other old people, all waiting for something, or someone, who will never come. Death is pretty much the only visitor that these folks can count on.
Another woman lies in bed everyday, the victim of a stroke that has left her speechless, yet her mind takes in everything around her. You can see by the expressions that she makes with her eyes that this lady understand everything that anyone says to her. But when the staff came in to “turn” her, they treated her like a sack of potatoes that need to be rolled every so often. If they pulled on an arm and hurt her, I could see the look of pain in her eyes yet since she couldn’t speak, the staff just kept on doing what they were doing, speaking to each other about their latest date or the last class that they took, totally unaware and unconcerned with whether or not this lady was comfortable.
The care that these folks receive consists, at best, of being turned from side to side every two hours and kept dry...maybe. The urine odor in the halls told me that very few of them stayed dry for any length of time. The little lady with the handsome husband was sitting in the hall asking to be taken to the bathroom and when I told someone, they responded, “She always says that, we just took her.” Well, I took it upon myself to take this lady to the bathroom and she wasn’t kidding. She had done her best to hold it in, not wanting to sit in her own waste. But no one would listen to her because, “She always says that.”
What a sorry state of affairs it is when we warehouse the folks that built out country to be the great nation that it is, only to toss them in these places to rot away. The populations of residents living in homes such as this one is growing larger and larger as the baby boomers age and develop one debilitating illness or another. If we don’t do something to make the lives of these folks better soon, we are destined to end up in the same places and the same sad situations.
I’ve worked in nursing homes for a good part of my nursing career and things are not getting much better since I started caring for them while I was a teenager. The people are few their meals through tubes or by spoons because the pureed meats and vegetables are all that their toothless mouths can handle. Today they had pumpkin pie for dessert, but that pie was in a bowl and looked more like pudding than anything else. Their days consist of sitting in wheelchairs lined up like cattle or lying in beds, with the only activity they experience is when they are turned from side to side to prevent bedsores.
I think that the richest country in the world should be able to find a better way to care for it’s elderly. There are other cultures and other times that treated they cared for their parents and grandparents with dignity and considered them a valued member of their families, keeping them at home where they were assured that they would be cared for with love by the people who loved them the most. In our society, we toss them in these homes to be cared for by strangers because they are just not convenient as we go about our busy lives. We seem to consider it much more important to go out and earn money so that we can buy things that make us feel as though we are important. No one seems to consider the fact that if we live long enough, we, too, will be in one of these places because we have not taught our own children that the elderly are anything more than a burden.
So many of the families of these people come to the home, not to visit, but to bitch at the staff over every little thing that isn’t to their own liking. Somehow, this behavior makes these family members feel as though they have done something for their parents when all they have done is assuage their own guilt feelings and convince the staff that they don’t really want to be bothered with these folks, they just want to make it appear as though they care. If they truly did care, they would take these poor people home and take care of them themselves. They fool no one but themselves.
If people could care for their own families years ago, surely we could do it with all the modern conveniences we have now. But, materialism and selfishness has replaced the love and concern that we once had for the people who cared for us when we were at our most helpless.
I had a patient once who had survived the Bataan Death March in WWII. He told me that he would rather go through that again than to be left in a nursing home. That’s pretty damn pathetic.
I will be going back to that place to visit my new friend. It’s a shame her family doesn’t realize the joy that this lady and those like her have to offer.
Meg
posted by Meg Kelso | 2:58 PM
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