Vent

The One Minute Writer prompt today is "vent" and I am supposed to "vent" about something that upsets me. But I can't really think of anything to vent about. However, the prompt did remind me of a Nursing story.

In the early 90's I worked at a Nursing Home in addition to the Red Cross. I had both jobs for a year or so then the Red Cross started giving me all the hours I could handle and I had to resign from the Nursing Home. My duties there were mostly to assist the Director of Nursing do some of the things that she did not have time to do. I did a lot of chart review and Drs. orders and Medication review and I drew all the blood for monthly lab work. I only worked one day a week but it was a busy day.

This was a small town Nursing Home with quite a high percentage of the staff related to at least one of the residents. They gave really good care. The food was excellent and the cook was so great. She did special dinners and BBQ's and picnics and just really tried hard to serve the residents. She succeeded over and over. I liked working there.

Now...the vent part of this story....

There was a resident that was really suffering from dementia. Sometimes older people with dementia are sweet and gentle and a pleasure....they just don't know where they are, who they are or what is going on....but they go with the flow.

That was not the case for this lady. She was tortured by her mind on a regular basis. She would receive "phone calls" from a vent in the commons room. She would scoot her chair over to the vent and yell. HELLO? WHAT? OH NO WHAT HAS HAPPENED!? Then she would scream and wail. She would calm herself down a bit and then try to continue the conversation through the vent but she was crying so hard that she could barely talk. The grief was real. It was acute and deep and it was a frequent occurrence. I don't think she ever got any good news from that vent.

The next step was for her to impart the bad news to the staff, other residents, visitors and whomever else would listen. It was always a tragic tale with a sort of especially gruesome twist somehow and it upset the other residents.

One that I remember was when her sister called her on the vent and told her that her nephew had been out scooping the walk and a gigantic icicle broke off of the house and skewered him and killed him.

Those were the type of phone calls she would get through the vent.

The staff would try to reorient her and argue with her about how the phone call wasn't real. They had been instructed by her Dr. to handle her in that manner.

I don't know if that was right or not. It wasn't my place to step in really, but that poor woman was convinced it was real. She was really and truly in shock and deeply grieved by the news that she received through the vent. When I did her med review I tried hard to determine if any of her meds could be to blame. Maybe it was a lack of medication. The staff just said that she had been like that for a long time. How terrible.

I never found a medical reason for her awful vent calls. At some point, sometimes I think it is better to not try to find the reason but to deal with the reality, in this case deal with her reality.

I came to that conclusion toward the end of my employment there. I talked to the Director of Nurses about it and asked if anyone had thought of putting a piece of furniture over that vent and telling the woman that the line had been disconnected. I don't know if any action like that was taken. I hope so. I hope that instead of just reorienting her that someone would comfort her and deal with her reality.

I resigned a few weeks later to work full time for the Red Cross. I still think about her sometimes. What a horrible thing to endure. I always wondered if she had lived a tragic life and kept reliving tragedy because it was familiar, or if she had lived a calm, sedate, safe life and the tragedy was just a manifestation of fears that she had of things that might happen but never really did. I will never know.