Peeved. Irritated. Irked. Annoyed.
To explain why I’m so annoyed, I’ll need to back up a day – yesterday I was feeling extremely dizzy and nauseated, my head was throbbing and my stomach hurt. The day before I’d gone up to Jamie’s for Thanksgiving and as I was climbing into my car, I hit my head against the frame – hence the headache. I then had to get up early the next morning for work, and since I’d gone to bed late the previous night that didn’t really help anything. I didn’t feel like eating anything on Friday, so I didn’t and taking medicine on a semi-empty stomach certainly didn’t help encourage my headache to go away – it made it worse, hence the dizziness and nausea and my neck, shoulders and back were in a lot of distress. Somehow I bruised my stomach Thursday night how I’m not sure – you can’t see the bruise but I can sure feel it. I was feeling pretty crummy and just wanted to sleep it off – but that was not an option. My first three visits went okay but on my fourth visit I found the resident soaked – either she’d just recently gone to the bathroom or she’d been laying in her own filth for a while, whichever way you look at it, it was disgusting. I’ve have never been tempted to toss my cookies in front of a resident but yesterday afternoon I came pretty darn close – give me heaps of dirty dishes, trash, laundry and fruit flies, digital stimulus and bed sores any day – copious amounts of urine and vomit are the two smells I cannot stand. It was obvious no one had checked her in a while – I got her all cleaned up, changed her clothes and bed linens and then put her back to bed. Her family is one of those who complain about everything we do and think because she refuses her showers we haven’t done anything – we do as much as we can but the resident still has the right to refuse their shower, we can’t force them to take it.
My visit right after this was at 1600 – I realize they’re not really doing anything but who wants to eat supper at four in the afternoon, take a shower and be in bed before 1730? Not me, but after the shower my resident was tired so I guess maybe they’re onto something. Anyway, I’d gone upstairs to retrieve my resident and bring her downstairs for supper and she was lying on the floor. She had fallen out of bed because the facility staff couldn’t be bothered to remember to pull up the railings – I was pissed at that point, mainly because she’d fallen a week and a half previously; her door had been locked, there was a chunk of BM on her bed spread, her brief was around her knees and a soiled brief above her head – both times she was fine but how many times can an old person fall before they seriously damage themselves? People die from falling, and she’s not exactly a spring chicken. She said she’d been lying on the floor for two hours, which while I think is an exaggeration, the staff knows that her little call button doesn’t work and with a propensity for falling you’d think that they’d check her more frequently. Evidently not.
I was irked because if the staff had been doing their job, my resident wouldn’t have fallen – either time and the other one wouldn’t have been swimming in her own pee. I know what goes on in nursing homes, I worked in three of them and am in and out of dozens of them with hospice – I know about the responsibility, the schedules and all the residents who need the exact same thing at the same time but prevention is a whole lot better than trying to fix it after it’s broken. All I’m saying is that they should’ve checked on the residents more frequently than they did.
In between these two visits I went into the office to turn in paperwork, where the scheduler asked me if I would be willing to pick up some visits this Saturday and next – never mind I had something I was actually going to do this Saturday. I couldn’t tell her no because my last paycheck was pathetically small and there was no one else left to ask. Half the time I think the scheduler hates me and the other part of the time we’re good – when I do her a favor we’re on great terms but when I need a favor it’s like I’m inconveniencing the whole world. I’m shaking my head at her right now.
I went to my friends place after work to blow off some steam and eat ice cream – when I left I had a message on my phone reminding me about ward cleaning the next morning. I’d agreed to do this at the beginning of the month and had since forgotten about it, so the reminder was good. This morning after we were done cleaning – there were like six of us and we spent about an hour – my co-worker called me up and asked me if I would see one of the ladies, apparently she doesn’t like guys. I told him I’d take care of it and changed into my scrubs.
I got said lady all showered and scrubbed clean and got her back in bed – she has bed sores on her feet and lower legs and they needed to be rewrapped. I told the nurse they needed to be done and I’d stick around to help and she got all irritated with me and said how we need to have her shower done earlier and I should have “known” that this resident doesn’t like male cna’s showering her and she didn’t have time to do it now. I so just wanted to tell her to chill – first of all how was I suppose to “know” that she didn’t like male cna’s? she loves the male nurse – out of the hundreds of residents I’ve taken care of, I can count on one hand the ones who want only a guy or only a girl to shower/change them. Because we didn’t know that, of course that put us behind – I was tempted to ask her if I could just rewrap her legs myself but somehow I don’t think that would have gone over too well, I’ve seen them do it multiple times and I probably could do it, but that’s not the point. I was there for two hours, I waited about half an hour before the other nurse came in and did it, and then he had to redo it because he’d done it wrong – in any case that put me behind. I was suppose to see a Home Health patient but couldn’t get a hold of her, which means I have to try again tomorrow. My other visit actually went fine except the shower got interrupted three or four times by people opening the door asking if anyone was in there. Unfortunately there’s no way to actually lock the door but the door was shut and the little “occupied” sign was up – if people had looked at it first instead of just barging in it would have been helpful. Just because these people are out of their tiny little minds doesn’t mean they don’t deserve some privacy.
It was everything from yesterday and then the nurse’s attitude this morning and then the lack of privacy at the other nursing home that just made me so mad and ticked off.
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