I love my thursdays lately. Mostly because it is almost always my day off lately. Today I am meeting up with my friend and we are going to do eachothers hair. I'm excited because I have been doing it myself lately and haven't had a haircut since February. I think I deserve it! My boss keeps scheduling me like 6 days in a row and by the last night I am usually so stressed out I want to quit. Things have been so hard there lately, we have so many residents to take care of now and not enough people, almost every day is a struggle. We have this one resident, he is so young, only 38. I feel so bad for him, he has lived in homes his whole life. He is extremely paranoid and very OCD. He doesn't understand that there is only 3 of us and 19 other people to take care of. When we have to go into his room, which is several times throughout the evening, he is so OCD that it takes a looong time to help him with his care. If we don't get to his room right way, which happens sometimes because we are taking care of another person, he gets so angry at us and throws accusations like we are putting him on the back-burner, he knows we are always talking about him, we don't want him there, we don't care about him, we never pay any attention to him because we are always with everyone else etc. Last night he made me so upset I started to cry. He had no idea what was going on, no comprehension of what else we do there. I tried to get to his room as fast as I could, as my other two girls I was working with were helping another lady in the bathroom (some people are so big, or can't move well, that it takes two people to transfer them from their wheelchair, to a commode, or their bed, chair et.). On my way to his room, one of our new resident's daughters stopped me and was asking me tons of questions, I had to give her her breathing treatment and when I got into her room the machine was apart and I had to figure out how to put it back together.....it was just one thing after another.
In my job almost everything is an emergency to people. They want things done right away and they want it done right, especially the residents family, otherwise they feel that their loved ones are being neglected etc.
You never know when something will come up spur of the moment...she ran into me at a bad time, but you cannot tell them to hang on or that you'll be right back...so by the time I finished up with her and got to our other resident he was just so angry with me. I definately took the mean things he was saying to me personal at first, even though I know that he doesn't understand. He has mental and psychological problems, and I just wish I could get into his head and understand him more. Thank God for people like my wonderful loving husband who care enough about people to become a Social worker, or Mental Health doctor or Nurse, or psych doctor.
Sometimes we just need a break, a rest. Mentally, emotionally, physically. Work will wear you down, and it's so hard to love what you do sometimes when you don't get that rest. You just begin to hate it. I cannot imagine being someone with a disorder like that, never getting any rest at all because it is constantly in your mind, it's who you are, your state of being. He says he hates himself, he hates his life. His mood is a constant rollercoaster, up and down.
I do my best by showing him I love him for who he is everyday by trying to be as patient as possible, and take the best care of him as I possibly can. My question to myself lately is how can I show him that God loves him? Just the way he is?
A little perspective
9 years ago
1 comment:
That is a great question. Joe and both work in a nursing home. Joe worked there for a year I worked there for three. It is the most taxing job physically and often emotionally. I had a love hate relationship with work. Reading what you wrote brought back a ton of those feelings and emotions even though it was ten years ago. My boss would often tell me because I was young I could handle working fourteen days in a row. The patients are very demanding and it wears on you. I was like you, I did not want to just care for them I wanted to love them, talk to them and be there for them because they often did not have anyone. The tricky part was the managment was in it for the money not because they cared for the residents. We were always short staffed. The days I wanted to quite or I thought life was horriable would often be the days one of the residents would start talking to me about their life and would start to realize that as horriable as my day could go at the end of it someone still loved me and cared for me. I still had family. A lot of them did not. I could not imagine that. It is hard dealing with anyone who has psych issues. Do your best love them, be patient with them and that is all you can do. YOu are one person.
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