This is going to be a very rambling thread, full of brain farts and possibly unrelated comments. Feel free to enter your own. And please try to refrain from judgment - I'm venting.
I remember the first time I fed someone a pureed diet. The dietitian asked me how she did, and I answered, "She ate all of the brown stuff, half of the green stuff, and none of the white stuff." She broke up.
That stuff looks horrible to me, but we just put an anorexic COPDer on pureed - an experienced coworker, LPN, had the brainstorm - and she's eating up a storm. Feeding herself, even. My, to be so weak that chewing is difficult!
And all they ever ask me for is salt. One day I just started laughing and answered the resident, "Honey, I know. And you're never going to get any." She smiled and kept eating.
I hate force-feeding people. I mean, not anti-suffragist feeding tube down the nose stuff, but really forcing people to eat. They and nature KNOW it's time to give it up, but read those regulations! God forbid that anyone die in an SNF.
I'm sick of taking care of other people's demented, dying relations, particularly when the denial factor runs rampant. I had someone say to me about her 94-year-old mom who has in the past suffered fractures pof both hips and both legs - the COPDer - "Should I get her up and walking? I'm just not ready to see her in a wheelchair yet." No? Honey, get ready to see her in a coffin, because that's the next stop. The mom sleeps EOD, when the CO2 overwhelms her, and sleep most of the days it doesn't. Let the poor thing go!
We have a married couple with galloping Alzheimers and they no longer recognize anyone, let alone one another. Their kids want to take them home for a celebration of their 60th wedding anniversary. For whom are they celebrating? Certainly not the parents. Let go of them!
Administration has all drunk the Kool-aid. They believe in the regulations forced down our throats. We should be fighting to get back the right to put a restraint around the waist of someone who falls asleep in her wheelchair and then falls ass over teakettle to (in one case) break her neck. We always have one horribly facially bruised resident who did that. But the facilty - no facility -= is not willing to get the belt care-planned for and risk having the state cite a "pattern of restraint." We should be fighting for the right to keep people safe. The pendulum has swung too far in the other direction.
And aside from demented wanderers, most people, singles aside, could care for relatives as was done in the old days. And if the relatives were at home they wouldn't live as ridiculously long with as little function or quality of life as they now do.
I have one woman who is horribly demented - mutiple strokes and infarcts - and always frightened. She actually recognizes me now, because I talk to her and treat her kindly - most others aren't mean to her, they just ignore her - and we have to justify her Seroquel to the state. Since when are lawyers and legislators physicians?
The state's due any minute, so we have someone painting the trim on all of the doors because gouges in the paint can get us cited! Good golly, Miss Molly! Can we say, stretchers and wheelchairs and med carts and geri chairs smashing into things, oh my? Of all the unimportant bulldinky.
I'm sure I'll have more to add later. Please, express yourselves.
