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Nursing home epiphany - Fate Fairies -book version
This entry was posted on 1/3/2012 1:45 AM and is filed under Fate Fairies:Fate Fairies - book version.
My foray into the health care world was in full gear. And, it had all started in July 1995 by noticing a note on the work table at the post office in New Glarus, Wisconsin, that read, "Ambulance drivers needed." By the beginning of 1996 and I was working nights at a nursing home in Madison, Wisconsin.
It was important to me then as I remember, that I undo all the illness stigma that I perceived had followed me from Texas a few years earlier. Just before leaving Texas for good, and one of the main reasons among many for leaving, was a bout with Meningitis and then a bout with blood clots a couple months later, both at the end of 1990. I remember thinking in 1996 as I was making this abrupt career change, that I was purging myself of the Texas blue-collar and resulting poor health experience.
To my surprise however, nursing home and health care work was extremely physical. I remember thinking sometimes after helping lift 350 pound patients, "Shit, I could have stayed in the mechanical blue-collar world and come out ahead." I was getting in better physical shape from weight training I resurrected again. I was also doing fire fighter training. And, lost was the limp that had lingered a couple years after the blood clot episode. At the risk of sounding sexist, the tiny girls working at the nursing home would often call me to help them lift patients.
Some times I would come home all hunched over walking like one of my 85 year old patients - and looking like a train wreck. Heide often said, "Hell, you should have stayed working as a welder."
Also, because I was a big guy, and still had some strength, and I drove a motorcycle now and then, the nursing home facilitators seemed to assign me all the motorcycle injury patients. There were a couple that stick in my head. One was a total vegetable, and very hard to care for. The other guy could get around in a wheel chair, but he was like a naughty kid and had lost a good deal of his physical and mental abilities.
I got sick of some of the nurses always lecturing me about the use of helmets. Head injuries were only part of these guys' problems. They would have to have had on full body armor at the time of their mishaps to have prevented their messes. But for those that do not know the culture of nurses, none of that meant a hill of beans to the neo-nanny state mentality that has wafted into the health care world today. God forbid the subject of guns and hunting comes up in the hospital break room. In my usual contrarian manner, all the nanny staters inspired me to seek out good old reckless habits I had already veered into throughout my life.
Speaking of the break room, an epiphany struck me one night as I took a break in an upper floor patient day-room by myself and looked out the dark window at the lights of Madison. Something seemed odd and I could not put my finger on it. Then it struck me like a brick. I had started my work day at 10:00 p.m. on February 12th. I looked up at the clock on the wall and it was now 2:00 a.m. on February 13th - it was my birthday. I had turned 40 years old in..., a fucking nursing home.
Asside from a stint working in an Alzeimer's center, this would be the first and last official nursing home I would work in. They would have about three patent wings on each floor. Each wing had up to 30 patients in it. Two nursing assistants would work on each wing - "suppose to work" was the operative term. Often I would work on a wing alone with 30 patients. Then someone would call in sick on another wing. I could end up with 45 patients, some 300 pounds, many without their cognitive abilities.
My brief journey into the dark-side world of nursing homes would end early in my ten-year foray into the world of heath care.
But besides being jolted into another reality by turning 40 in a nursing home, there was an accumulative epiphany. I had seen the normally unseen side of dying. Here in America the urban legend and hushed whispers are true - we warehouse our old people. And not all old people just have bad luck and end up warehoused. Some folks dote away their lives - although it is still a free country to do so - and on occasion, I would get some feedback from patients that still had all their mental cookies.
On more than one occasion, people had regrets about how they had lived their lives. So much for the mantra, "If I had it to do over again, I would not change a thing." Enough people volunteered their angst about how their lives turned out, a light bulb went on in my pea brain.
These patients and residents were in their 80s and 90s. They had grown up in an era when you obeyed authority, obeyed your fathers, obeyed your government, obeyed current norms, cultures, and mores of the day. That era was however gone, the "overlords" of their social conditioning were all dead, and now these patients who had carried the water of said era, languished in a nursing home left holding the bag of mundane lives - and it dawned on some of them.
..., they had regrets.
I vowed, I would not let the same thing happen to me if I could at all manipulate my fate. Shortly after hearing stories of regretful nursing home and hospital patients, I graduated from college, entered graduate school, traveled to Vietnam and Laos three times, bought a Harley, traveled to war-zone Iraq twice..., and, write every day.
..., I am off to a good start heading off similar regrets.
And if the current era overlords of social norms and mores are offended, no apologies will be offered by yours truly.
Note: This blog "Fate Fairies" - book version Category is a work in progress. The original vignettes are being edited for book form. Go to the Cooldadiomedia Web site and the Fate Fairies Page for an ordered chronology of the book vignettes (chapters).
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