Mortality Check

I dislike old people.

And I mean that in the nicest way possible. I'm a nursing student, right? We have to take care of everyone. It's how we learn. But in the past few years, I've learned that I just can't handle the elderly. At all. Whatsoever. I don't know if they just gnaw at my heart or if it's their musty nursing home odor, but I really can't do it. And when people asked why I, the soft-hearted younger (youngest, really) student, would rather work with child cancer patients than work with the elderly, I could never answer them.

Until Wednesday night.

This past Wednesday my group and I spent a day at an Alzheimer's and Dementia facility in our area. It was the only place I had ever seen that really spoke to what we learned in class. There was a single nurse to five patients which is AMAZING considering that in most hospitals and nursing homes, there is a single nurse to seven or ten patients, sometimes even more. And, the funny thing is, they tell you all the time that the stuff that you learn in your textbooks is rarely what you do in real life. Our care is supposed to focus on the patient and instead, it becomes focused on watching our own backs and making sure everything is documented. But at this facility, it was actually incredible as to how attentive the nurses were being and how much they personally cared for the patients--from brushing hair to massaging hands, the care was superb.

And I had a wonderful patient. An older woman who just "wished things were different" and knows that "something is not right" but when you forget things over and over again and you repeat the same thing over and over again and you ask the same questions and realize that something is wrong with you but keep forgetting what it is...it's heart wrenching.

So maybe I don't dislike old people.

Maybe, just maybe, I love them a little too much.