I have recently started a new (additional) job. I have started work as a Personal Care Worker at an Aged Care Facility. The reason for this has been two fold. 1) I need more money! 2) Doing my nursing part time, the time gaps between my clinical placements is so much longer. I have a fear that the next time I’m in a hospital doing a placement, I will take too long to get used to ‘handling’ patients again. This work will help me to ‘keep my hand in’ so to speak. Personal care work is good basic nursing, providing me with valuable experience.
I have to say it has been confronting on various levels. The very environment is confronting. Spending time in a large living/dining area that is quite noisy as residents are chatting, yelling, singing, just sitting blankly, playing with food, playing with themselves, undressing and dressing themselves is an assault on the senses. The smells of a nursing home are particularly assaulting. All smells, those of things that go into the body and those that are expelled from the body, all seem to merge into the same odour.
Seeing humans being treated as objects is confronting. This sounds critical, and on some level it is, however there are times when that’s what I feel I am doing when I’m washing and changing severely demented people whose limbs are as stiff as a board, or waving about like a brandishing weapon.
It is confronting to think that this is how many people end their lives, herded together with similar aged people whose worlds have diminished to what is happening within a couple of metres of them. (This is particularly so for the man in his late 40s who is a resident there due to his MS). It is confronting to think that maybe that’s how I might end my days, or more urgently, how my parents might end their lives.
The very experience of starting a new job, learning where things are kept, trying to remember other staff’s names, learning the ‘culture’ of the workplace, has been exhausting. It has been nearly nine years since I started a new job in a new organization. I haven’t been a newbie for so long. Being the introvert that I am, it comes at some cost.
I make it sound like it’s all negative, but it’s not. I am slowly finding my place, how I relate with the residents in a way that I feel is right for me, how to wind down after a shift…….and I’ve had my first payslip which helps greatly!!
3 comments:
Hi Campbell,
You’re to be admired for working in an Aged Care Facility; not everyone could handle the job. Your post made me reflect back to last year when my 85 year mother spent a month in a Hospice, after falling and breaking her hip and wrist. When I first started visiting her, I was appalled at some of the sights and smells (yes, what goes in and comes out do start to resemble one another!) that I encountered. But after a few days I began to recognize several of the patients and their families (who tended to visit about the same time I did everyday) and in some strange way I felt we were relating to one another and “bonding”. As relieved as I was to have my mother return home, I often wondered how the other patients where doing and how their loved ones were holding up under the stress that illness/dying creates in the dynamics of relationships.
I don’t know whether I’d go so far as to say it’s “comforting to think this is how many people end their lives” but I suppose if you’re in a reputable Nursing Care Facility, being attended to by qualified staff and have family or loved ones who visit, it wouldn’t be horrific. After watching my father suffer with liver and pancreatic cancer, I’d like to die in my sleep and never know what happened. That’s what everyone prays for…
My mother has dementia and is in a nursing home. I have great sympathy for the staff who work so diligently in a difficult environment.
I am also reassured that my mother is safer in the professional care of the nursing home than the best that I could provide for her now in the family home.
I hope it all goes well for you ! new job environemnts can be very stressful! XXX
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