Wednesday, June 17, 2009 9:45 PM CDT
COLUMN: Head for the hospital with a smile and a souped-up wheelchair
By PENNY WEAVER, News Editor
pweaver@jg-tc.com
Visiting a friend in the hospital this week brought back some good memories.
You just haven’t lived until you’ve participated in a wheelchair race down a long, dim hospital hallway in the middle of the night.
Not that, um, I would ever do such a thing. I’m just sayin’.
I don’t know how the average person feels about going to the hospital, whether as a visitor or a patient. Naturally, the latter wholly depends on the reasons for your stay, and I suppose the former does as well.
I guess it’s because I once worked in a hospital, but the doc’s office and other health care facilities don’t bother me when I need to go there. My mom’s a retired nurse, and one of my sisters is an ER nurse, so maybe it’s just “in the family,” too.
Of course, it’s all in how you look at it. One might associate a hospital with death, naturally, but I prefer to look at the brighter side of the coin: all the wonderful, caring people who work there.
During vacations and summers from college, I was a nurse’s aide at the Shelbyville hospital, which has (for a little while longer anyway) a third-floor nursing home wing. So I kind of got the experience of working both on the regular hospital floors and in a nursing home setting.
Stopping by long-term-care facilities doesn’t bother me either. Maybe it’s because my three sisters and I went with Mom to visit my Grandma Bauer frequently in the nursing home many years ago. Old people love kids, and I remember one old lady who always wanted to hold my hand and talk a minute.
She’d hold my hand as if she never wanted to let go. I really felt for her — she must have been lonely. Mom often said that folks in the nursing home sometimes just want to shake your hand and see you smile, so I always tried to hold their hands and visit a minute, say something funny, and give them a big smile.
I understand why these kinds of facilities are tough for most people to visit. It’s a reminder that we’re all likely to get old and decrepit some day, and it’s a reminder that death gets us all in the end.
But I decided a long time ago, when working with these old folks, that rather than focus on the likely frustration and depression they often feel in their aged condition, I’d just try to make them smile, or give them a hug, or insert a positive moment in their day. At least that’s something.
Luckily, I’m naturally goofy. That does come in handy.
Working the night shift, my most frequent duty was turning bedridden people and taking vitals: blood pressure, pulse, respirations, etc. We helped people up to portable commodes as needed, often every two hours to help them avoid a wet bed.
Pretty glamorous, huh? Nurse’s aides do most of the “dirty work” in health care, and they sometimes get too little respect. But most of the nurses I worked with were good to us aides, and were good to their patients too.
There are always characters among the hospital or nursing home patients. Often, after having a stroke or other illness, the patient can’t help their behavior. I always tried to give them the benefit of the doubt.
There was one skinny old man who always called for an aide to help him when he needed to use the urinal. Mind you, he was perfectly capable of accomplishing this task on his own. But he liked the young women in close proximity, I think.
One grouchy old lady became worse after she broke a hip and later returned to the nursing home wing. I asked her once if she’d like me to get my guitar and sing her a song, and she loudly repeated, “No! No! No! No! No!”
Well, OK; if she was sure.
During quiet time on the night shift, we did have a wheelchair race or two. Mostly, though, we did a lot of cleaning to keep busy if it was quiet. And there were always those nights when I, as an aide, had more than a dozen patients on my list, and that was a lot of filling ice pitchers, emptying foleys (catheter bags), washing backs in the a.m., etc.
I felt bad for stroke patients, for example, who’d lost the ability to talk and communicate or even move. Some lay in beds for years. I often looked into their eyes, talking to them as I turned them, trying to say something positive, wondering if they were mentally aware, even if they couldn’t express anything. I hoped they weren’t.
I suppose we got away with some shenanigans on the night shift that other shifts couldn’t try, although we traded that for sleep deprivation and the general disruption of the body’s normal rhythms due to staying up all night and attempting to sleep during the day.
I took my guitar in to the hospital once in a while and sang a couple of songs early in the a.m. for some nursing home residents. There’s nothing quite like singing “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” to a 90-year-old lady while she sits on the commode in the dim morning light.
Nurse’s aides and many other average workers seem to be invisible in all the recent talk of health care reform. It’s all about dollars and doctors — two vital components, but not the only ones. Nurses and their aides, and cafeteria workers, and custodians, and many others do so much to keep a hospital running.
If you get a chance to vote on any health care reform from the government, vote for something that puts people first. Money is money — it’s a tool. Providing comfort to people in their ill health and/or old age is what should come first.
Next time you go to the nursing home or to the hospital to visit someone, stifle your discomfort and offer an old or ailing person a smile. Hold someone’s hand a minute.
You could even challenge them to a wheelchair race and intentionally lose. That oughta boost an octegenarian’s day.
Just watch some of those corners at the ends of the halls — they can be pretty narrow ... so I hear.
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medic57 wrote on Jun 18, 2009 3:21 AM:
My recent stay in the Hospital was as pleasent as could be. The Nurses were always there with my meds when I didn't feel good, The Support partners were always there to freshen up my bed and pillows when needed, which was often, and the Care Partners were ALWAYS friendly when it was time for a Popsicle, which was often, Thanks ladies, they even scratched my back when I had a mild allegic reaction to Dilaudid, We are indeed lucky to have such a great hospital so close by. "