Sights and personalities

You know it is meal time when you walk down the halls and all you see in the rooms are chairs in the "eject" position.

The only time I hear all the televisions tuned to the same station is when the Hawkeyes are playing. And that is the only time I've seen the TV on in the dining room. We must be in Iowa.

The best gift you can give a hard-of-hearing resident of any facility is headphones so no one else has to listen their loud TV.

It is a relief to walk into a patient's room and hear a conversation happening in normal tones, especially after having spent 35 minutes "yelling" at another patient and even then, having to repeat everything twice.

Dementia has it's advantages -- at least for the therapist. I have a couple of patients who have "thrown me out" but 10 minutes later don't remember I had just been there. With a change of approach I might even get them to agree to do what they just refused to do.

As an occupational therapist, I do my best to have my patients do things that they would normally do especially if they plan to go home. That however can be a challenge at times. One woman told me, "Of course I can dress myself, but I'm paying enough money here that someone else can do it for me!" After another woman made a sandwich she declared, "There! Do you now believe I can make a sandwich?! You do know that I've been making sandwiches for far longer than you've been alive!" Of course I had explained to her numerous times that the point wasn't that she couldn't do it. The point was to have her do things that she would do when she got home.

One of my patients who is in his 90s told me that almost all of his friends are in the cemetery. He had no idea why he had survived WWII and had been so healthy until recently and others hadn't. He concluded that life is short even when you live into your 90s so you'd better live for eternity. I couldn't agree more.