Some of you may have grandparents or even parents in one of these, but the rest tend to imagine it like this:
Truth is, it looks more like this:
As sad as this may sound you, this is not a
happy place. Paliative Care (my old assignment) was Disneyland compared to one
of these places. Old people are sad and hard to take care of. They have a lot
of both mental and physical problems. Death is a natural part of life, but it's
definitely not a pretty part. Some of the patients here will spend years
watching how their most basic functions simply disappear before the final
arrives. Which translates into spending a big amount of money and meds in their
care. And I won't even count food or recreational activities (they love to put
this on the flyers) because that's a whole other deal and I don't feel like
talking about it. Also, think about this for a minute: The only reason why they
are in a residence is because they can't take care of themselves and probably
their families, don't know either. Or don't care.
What's the solution, then? Well, the most
practical and economical thing to do would be to round up everyone above 70 and
kill them. Cruel, you say? This coming from a guy with 4 grandparents, two of
them over 90. Of course, we won't do that (for now) because I'd like to think
we still have some ethics. But sadly, this is a rising problem with no
solution.
So, what am I learning from this practice
period, besides how to become a psychopath? Well, I'm learning humanity, of
course. Today I discovered something quite amazing: Turns out, I'm not
immortal. Quite the shocker, right? Here's the thing young people ignore about
life: It eventually ends. You don't know when that will be but it will happen.
And I will probably have a lot of health problems, something logic after 80
years fighting every single disease I have. Cancer, alzeheimer, dementia,
parkinson (no videogames for me after this one), infections, broken limbs,
muscular degeneration... The list goes on and on. And I think that after so
much time working, studying, raising a family (I hope a dog counts) doing all
the good I can and fixing all the mistakes I'll surely do, I think I deserve
some peace at the end. And we have so much people in our residence who lived a
war, a post-war, a dictatorship, people who survived everything you could
imagine and today keep fighting when I would probably have surrendered a long
time ago.
And that's why for the next month I'll be
trying to make the last part of their life journey as comfortable as I can.
Let's be honest here, I'm clearly not the best nurse on the planet, but I'll do
whatever I can with a smile. And that's all I will ask for to the nurse who
takes care of me in the dusk of my life.
