2017 October 21, Saturday

 Tonight’s meal was a doozy in terms of drama.

The meal was as usual: soup, a small plate of ‘main’ and a piece of bread and butter and jam and some fruit, and tea.Tonight’s soup was potato and leek (I think) where the leek had only a passing acquaintance with the potato.  The ‘main’ was two small patties made of peas held together by egg, with a spoonful of iceberg lettuce salad.  I passed on the patties and had microwaved ‘scrambled’ eggs and some of the salad.  The fruit was papaya.

We have a relative newcomer to our table, a long spindleshanks of a man, D, who first impressed me with the twinkle in his eye - a mischievous look that attested to a lively sense of the ridiculous.  He is in a wheelchair and has very long legs so he looks a little ridiculous - the wheelchair is too small for him.  He is very deaf, which made conversing difficult, and like most deaf people, he speaks loudly.  But lately, he has become depressed.  The main reason for this, I have heard, is because his wife has ceased visiting him.  He has been put on suicide watch, which sounds quite ignoble and undignified.  Remind me to never say I want to kill myself: I don’t want to be in the same situation.  Not only is D checked every 15 minutes in the night-time, he is only allowed plastic cutlery to eat with.  The irony of the plastic cutlery is that it is much easier to do damage with plastic cutlery than with the ordinary metal implements that we usually use - especially if one breaks a plastic spoon/knife/fork and rubs it against concrete to sharpen it - or even without sharpening, it would very easily cut skin and artery.  Eating a meal with plastic cutlery is not easy, and D certainly felt justifiably angry (in my opinion) at being given a plastic teaspoon with which to eat his soup.  Despite his evident anger, he said mildly enough that he usually ate soup with a soup spoon.  The carer prevaricated too long; I appealed to him to give D a soup spoon as he couldn’t do anything with it, but D grew angry and tossed the proffered soup spoon across the table.  

D then became tearful and told us that he hadn’t seen his wife for several weeks. This upset me, as it was obvious his distress was deep.  I moved away from the table and got some Vegemite in order to hide my own tears.  D calmed down a little after this and the only event after this of note was that he knocked his cup of milk all over R who was sitting next to him.  Not a drop on himself, of course.  

It is very easy to get depressed in a nursing home.  The very fact of being here is enough to depress anyone.  It is like being in hospital in a way, but with a more relaxed set of rules.  The ‘nurses’ tell one to do this or that, or if one is in a wheelchair, arbitrarily take one (or leave one waiting for up to an hour) to where they think one ought to be.  A nurse will stand over a resident and watch them take their medication, and a carer will fetch them from their room if they are late for a meal.  The carers will whisk residents off to their rooms and put them to bed as soon as tea is over. I like to go to sleepy early, but I baulk at being put to bed at 6pm.  

There is a loss of autonomy despite attempts to give residents ‘choice’ in what they do and when they do it; the day is highly regimented and structured and there is not much to do apart from planned activities which take up about half the available time.  Most residents spend a lot of time sitting in their rooms watching television or just laying on their beds.  Most residents do not have regular visitors and a majority never leave the building.  There is a sameness to every day, and residents will often forget which day it is.  There is nothing in the activities or the care to indicate the passing of time; for example the only way to know it is the weekend is that the activities officer changes from the week day one to the weekend one.  To the confused residents this is not significant. 

There is a feeling of isolation as well, as a nursing home is a  world in itself; people come in to see residents, but residents need not go out, unless they need to visit  a specialist doctor or go to hospital (which is usually done in an ambulance, thus increasing the feeling of isolation).  The GP, the podiatrist, the dentist, optometrist, hairdresser, nail artiste, etc, all visit. A resident, if relatively healthy - that is, not having a health problem that requires visits to hospital or a specialist - need not leave the home from one end of the year to the next.  And, some don’t.  And a lot of the residents don’t get visitors either.  Some don’t have relatives and others have relatives that stop coming.  

Nursing homes are depressing places even to visit.  Stepping into the main lounge area of our home, you are faced with rows of old people sitting in lounge chairs with empty looks on their faces; watching television, or napping.  There is sometimes a vague smell of urine.  Old people wander about and carers speak loudly to them to come and sit down or to come this way. There is a feeling of hopelessness in the air. It is no wonder that relatives don’t like coming.