Writing Workshop: Dentures, dementia, and frail, smiling dolls

Welcome back to the Writing Workshop link-up! At the bottom of this post you’ll find the widget to post the link to your workshop posts. I’m looking forward to reading what you’ve come up with!

First of all it’s my turn. This week I chose prompt number 2, a place I used to work…

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When I was 19 I took a job working as a care-assistant in a care home for the elderly.

I thought I wanted to be a nurse. I have wanted to be many things in my short(ish) life and right then a nurse was it. I wanted to be able to put some experience down on my application form for a nursing degree starting that next autumn as the university I was looking at was highly competitive, but mostly I just wanted to see if I could do it, see if I was cut out for it.

I was. I think I surprised everyone, even myself.

I only stayed seven months before having to go off sick. The odd aches and pains I had been experiencing for the last couple of years escalated into a shutting down of my body that lasted till just before my wedding day when I was 25, robbing me off my place at university, and my ability to walk, and many other things, and set me on a new path. But that is another story, and one you have heard before.

And what a seven months is was.

The care home was split into two floors and I worked downstairs, in the high-dependency nursing wing. Long corridors of  hotel-like rooms that smelt of school dinners, and E45 cream with that musty, acrid smell of urine and old clothes that is so characteristic of older people at the end of their lives, no matter how carefully and lovingly they are washed and cared for.

I worked in a team caring for about 30 very elderly and ill people, male and female. Many with advanced stages of dementia, others with end-stage cancer, and nearly all with complex medical needs needing round-the-clock care.

There was no easing-in gently when it came to that job. They were short staffed and the matron pragmatic, with little time for sensitivity or hesitancy.

In the space of my first shift I had wiped my first wrinkled bottom, and fed my first shaking patient. I had learnt how to use a hoist, and change a bed with hospital corners.  I saw my first old man penis, and my first old lady breasts, both of which I washed with my cheeks burning and knees shaking. I removed my first pair of dentures, and learnt how to dress and undress a patient as they sat in a chair or lay on a bed. I was shouted at, and pinched, and smiled at faintly through misty, heavy eyes.

I came back that first night and cried. Completely overwhelmed with this raw life I had no idea existed and this immense responsibility I now felt for these people.

But I went back the next day, and the day after that. I vowed to treat everyone as if they were my grandmother or grandfather and make a difference to the short time that they had left. And to my credit, I did.

I have many memories of that place. I don’t think they’ll ever leave me. And I’d like to share a few with you.

Walking from room to room the first thing that struck you were the differences between rooms. Those with family left to love them would have rooms stuffed full of photos and knick-knacks. On weekend shifts their rooms would be overflowing with assorted family members, whom I would trip over apologetically as I went about my tasks. But then there were the others, those with rooms bare but for the standard, regulation furniture and the odd, faded pot plant.

I confess I lingered longer in those rooms.

E had severe dementia, progressed to the point where she would spend long days sat motionless and silent, staring and unresponsive to the flickering television in her empty room. He limbs were stiff and hard to manipulate in to hoist and bath chair. She never spoke, but would sometimes cry, seemingly prompted by nothing, or jibber sounds over and over in a way that reminds me now of Kai. She frightened me, I’m not going to lie. But she had the most beautiful, white hair that I would brush slowly, and a drawer full of pretty, lacy nighties that I would pick out for her and dress her in before bed.

I never saw anyone visit her. On mother’s day I took her some flowers, and I swear, that day, she smiled at me. First and last time. For a second there was something there as she looked at me, and then it was gone again.

B had a room stuffed full of things. Visitors were frequent, and loud, as were she. Nothing wring with her marbles that one. But something wrong with everything else as cancer ate her up.

Helping to take care of  B was the first time I realised how much dying could hurt someone. And I was with her as she died. She didn’t go easy. She cried and she writhed, until the morphine kicked in and her breathing slowed, and stopped. And I looked up at the nurse I had sat with and said “Is that it?” and she nodded. And we closed her eyes and I sat with her as the nurse called the doctor to come and pronounce her. And I cried hard and shook, even though she was so still and not in pain any more.

N was different. N was gentle, the brain tumour robbing him of speech but not of humour or the twinkle in his eye. I would offer to take his lunch to him as I loved sitting quietly in his room listening to the radio with him as I fed him spoonful after spoonful. It was different when he died. There was no drama, no fuss. He just slipped away. We knew he was dying, even I knew the signs by that point, and his wife had been called.  I was the one that made her a cup of tea, that I collected, untouched later, and who shut the door as she said her goodbyes.

The next day I bought a peace lily in his honour, that lasted for years after he had passed. I called it after him and used to talk to him. I know that sounds daft, but I did.

So many more memories. Picking out outfits from wardrobes, with matching pearls, for my ladies to wear. It was like dressing dolls. Old, frail dolls. My frustration and anger with the care assistants I worked with who were rude or rough, because there were some like that, inevitably. The smell of hot milk, heated in the microwave, for bed-time Horlicks. The smell of an open bed sore, of a poor woman recently come to us after a long stay in hospital. My anger at that.

The quiet, dim lighting of the late shift after lights had been switched off. The feel of a one lady’s soft hand as she told me I was her favourite and that she loved me. I think she meant it too. The old couple that lived in next door rooms, married 60 years, and her still shouting through the wall at him to tell him off. Her pain when he died,which only now I have Ant, I can even begin to remotely understand.

All of that in seven months.

In a comment on Deer Baby’s recent post I described as one of the worst jobs I’d ever done. But I think I was harsh there. It was hard, yes, but actually I preferred it to my brief stint serving burgers in an American-style diner.

Because if nothing else, it was real. The most real thing I have ever done, until now, having Kai, being a mother. In a weird way I think it prepared me for that.

I wouldn’t go back, nursing wasn’t for me. But I am grateful for my time there, and everything I learnt there. However painful at times, I feel I am richer for those experiences, a more complete human being.

I learnt that life was hard, and cruel sometimes, but also beautiful and tender and bitter sweet and full of opportunities for love and kindness.

Which, in terms of life’s lessons, is about all there is.

Thanks for listening.

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So now it’s your turn. What prompt did you choose?

1. Spring is definitely making its presence known at last. How is it making you feel? Do you feel anything new ’sprouting’ alongside all the new shoots and buds? What signs to you look for, both inside of yourself and outdoors, to tell you spring is here?
- Inspired by Mummy Limited’s lovely hope-filled post: ‘Is it here? It is, you know, it’s definitely here….’ and the Spring Equinox at the weekend.

2. Tell me about somewhere you used to work. A location: a town, a country, a tiny cubicle, a massive warehouse, even. Describe your memories of that place and your time there.
- Inspired by the Moiderer’s ‘Diary of a travelling executive‘ describing her time in Dublin

3. What do you secretly dream of your children doing? We all know they are not us and more than anything we would want to see them happy, but sometimes a wish to live vicariously through them is unavoidable. Confess your secret dreams for them.
- Inspired by Tasha at WAHM-BAHM who is wondering ‘How to avoid the temptation to clone’

4. Describe a ‘letting go’ that made you happy, rather than sad. What have you been ready to say goodbye to? What new future have you been ready to embrace?
- Inspired by Sam’s beautiful ‘Bye Bye Baby’ on her fab new blog ‘Keep Calm & Eat Cake’

5. Have you ever made a decision based purely on instinct? How did it work out?
- Inspired by my decision to follow my gut and say no to the health visitor last week.

Leave your name and the URL to your post in the MckLinky below (the URL should be to your post not just to your blog) and leave me a comment to let me know you’ve taken part. If you have the time it would be great if you could try and read and comment on at least two other entries. And be kind! It’s supposed to be a bit of fun – we’re not looking for the next Booker Prize winner here!

If you haven’t had chance to respond yet, then you’ve still got till Sunday to enter your link! Or just wait till next week, when there’ll be five brand new prompts to get you thinking.

This Writing Workshop is brought to you in association with Mama Kat’s Losin’ It – who’s lovely author came up with the concept and runs her own workshop over in the U.S.

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