Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Tired!

My job is sucking the life out of me! More and more responsbility, no increase in pay for three years. How much longer am I expected to continue? Nursing is hard. Nursing in long term care is even harder! Burning out.

Saturday, May 22, 2010

Time-Waster

Daughter arrives with two bunches of flowers from farmer's market. Nurse at med cart, obviously very busy. Daughter stands there and requests scissors in order to cut ends off of flowers for mama. Nurse searches frantically for scissors other than her bandage scissors. Daughter relentless, won't give up. Nurse has to go to the office for a pair of scissors for stupid flowers. Daughter ruins scissors cutting stems! Now, would it have been a sin for the daughter to just put the freakin flowers in a vase as they were? Nurse wasted 5 minutes in order to make demanding daughter happy.

Thursday, May 20, 2010

More Crazy Families

Ever wonder how nutty your kids will behave when you are in a nursing home? Resident has four daughters, three of whom are nurses. This lady was admitted following a hip fracture and surgical repair. Daughters decide that someone has to spend every night with "Mommy". Daughters decide that "Mommy can't get out of bed". WHAT?? She's here for freakin' rehab! How the hell is she gonna get any better if she stays in bed all day?

Care plan meeting held. Daughter's gently informed that "Mommy" would likely get better faster and be ready to go home quicker if they loosen the hold on the apron strings a little.

Long story short, daughter's bitch, stating "They're throwing us out", go home, "Mommy" suddenly develops an affinity for dining in the dining room with all the other ladies and enjoys her self! "Mommy" leaves the nursing home in better shape than she was in prior to falling and fracturing her hip! Daughters send lovely letters of thanks and praise!

I totally could do without all the excess drama that well-meaning, grown (some in their 60's and 70's) children bring to my job!

Tales from the Nursing Home

Okay! Every place of employment has it's share of crazy people but for some reason, our nursing home seems to have an abundance of craziness! Not the residents, you see, even though many have dementing diagnoses. Rather, it's the crazy family members that seem to make our day interesting. Take "Joana", for instance. This seemingly normal woman arrived one day interested in admitting her mother. She toured the facility, completed the application and we began the process of admissions.

Shortly after this resident was admitted, things started to seem a little "strange" about this daughter so we "Googled" her. Turns out she had a website listing herself as an "astrologer" and some kind of natural food chef with a "wellness" B&B on the side. Okayyy. It gets better.

Within a week of this precious elderly lady being admitted, her four children began arriving almost daily with lawyers, bankers and such! Turns out, these kids have been fighting over their mother's money for years and the fight continued in our facility! We were then visited by an attorney representing herself as the resident's guardian ad litem since the kids were all fighting over "custody" of mom and her money. Thankfully, none of the kids were awarded guardianship and another attorney was appointed to protect this poor woman from her greedy, and a little crazy, children.

Since that time (almost a year ago), daughter "Joana" began a downward spiral into craziness. She started arriving at all hours of the night to "visit" her mother, usually during meal times and we noted she was dining on mom's dinner! One night, she scared the crap out of the nurse on duty as she was found sleeping in the hospital bed with her mother at 3:00 am! The guardian had to put boundaries on her visits, limit her questions of the staff (because we didn't want to put mom on all of her crazy vitamins and supplements), and generally try to control this daughter's behavior. THEN the daughter went back to court in an attempt to re-gain guardianship of mom and her money! Again, she lost, thankfully.

Her next move was to arrive in the nursing home with the police in order to collect her "personal belongings". Now, maybe I'm the crazy one, but you'd think anything she brought in to be in her mother's room would belong to her mother. Well, we knew what was coming next. Within two weeks of her last visit (the guardian had to finally ban her from the building), the State showed up on a complaint (from "Joana") then the crazy bitch actually reported me to the Board of Nursing by stating we were "withholding treatment" from her mother. What is key here, is that her mother had been hospitalized a couple of months before and was referred to Hospice as she was declining cognitively, her COPD was much worse and her poor heart was barely functioning.

Next up: she started sending random men in to "visit" her mother and those men would bring "special pudding" that "Joana" had made for her mother! Needless to say, had to put a stop to that right away! Guardian had to ban all visitors except for this woman's children (except for "Crazy Joana").

With all that nursing home staff have to deal with, families like this are more prevalent than you'd imagine. I have no idea how people like "Joana" function in the "real world" considering how totally crazy they are in our setting. Just another day at work!