One of my favorites is extremely agitated..yells, gets up out of her chair, and her mind goes faster than her mouth so her sentences are all garbled. She will lash out at most people who try to calm her down. I stop and say hi to her when I see her out in the hall and her face just lights up. They pass by with her and I see someone waving at me in the corner of my eye and its her waving and I make a big deal of her presence and she loves it.
Another one of my favorites is also a dementia patient who thinks she still lives at home. She gets up out of bed at night to turn all the lights off because of the electric bill. Another time during the day shift they were doing construction down the hall and she heard what sounded like knocking. I hear her say "Hold on I'll be right there" She goes to get up and her chair alarm goes off. I run over to her and make her sit back down and she said "Oh but theres someone at the door I have to answer the door".. She also drinks wine with dinner. I bought her wine to her one night and she said "Oh excellent." lol The whole room laughed.
One of my fav residents is a Parkinson's man, he has great difficulty moving and has no facial expressions. He can talk,, but you have to listen carefully. He's a very proud man and a pleasure to care for. He really makes my day when he's playing his Motown music.
This is my first nursing job and I really like LTC. I enjoy working with the same residents every weekend, even if some of them are really challenging because of their dementia. I plan on staying in LTC after I get my RN.
while i have never worked in a nursing home, i can still share a couple of stories.
while i was in college 100 miles away from home, it became unsafe to care for grandma at home any longer and she went into a local nursing home. it was brand new and only had a few residents (or "guests" as they were called,) so the guests all had private rooms. at the very end of the hall was a teeny tiny little old lady who was 102. she had been a concert violinist and also played the piano.
she was suffering from dementia and frequently wandered and got lost. as time passed, grandma and
this lady lost the ability to speak. grandma had advanced parkinson's. they became best friends despite their limitations and issues. grandma would hold her bible and say unintelligable things and
____ would read her old testament to grandma and they'd both look at each other and nod.
the friend would escape her posey and head down the hall to freedom. grandma would hear her coming
(and despite the fact that she could no longer speak) and talk her back to her room, speaking only in german, which she had taught for years. the other lady, who was an orthodox jew, only remembered and understood yiddish. different languages, but similar enough that they could communicate -- sort of.
grandma would count... "one...two...three..." "am i back home yet, mary?" "not yet,____. "four...etc.)
they'd sit together in the day room and talk back and forth. both chattering and neither making any sense at all. they rocked away hours and hours.
one weekend, i was home from college and went to the nursing home to visit my grandma, and i heard a very strident, very familiar voice from my past. she had been a client of my dad's for years. she was about 4'8", about 80#, and always, but always, in charge of whatever. she appeared at our kitchen door weekly with a cauldron of some kind of soup. she'd hand it to my mom, and always say, "enjoy it, dahlink."
if it happened to be a chicken based soup, she'd always say, "i use da feets, dahlink. only da feets for ___'s zoop." my mom used to say she would have enjoyed the zoop sooo much more if ___ had just picked out "de feets" before delivering.
she entered the home and kept trying to help in the kitchen. she just could not understand why the
cook bought those terrible horrible awful frozen chickens, when she knew a man who would have been pleased to deliver as many live ones as the needed. "just think, dahlink! they can lay eggs until you need them." i would have loved to be a fly on the wall of that administrator's office that day...
she also made different types of poultices and plasters her whole life. before she went into the home, she had an appointment with my dad, who was just getting over a cold. about an hour later, ___ appeared at the office, poultice in hand. before my 6'6" father knew what hit him, she had his shirt and undershirt off and was slathering on a mixture of bear grease, witch hazel, dry mustard, and some other stuff. she topped it with a length of flannel, he dressed again, with orders not to remove it until morning. when he took it off that night to shower, he felt better, and, believe it or not, by morning was cured. when she moved in to the nursing home, most of her "medicinal" supplies came too. she never quite understood why she couldn't help. she had two broad catagories of men: the ones she called "dahlink" and the larger group of "great black xxxxxrds." depending on what someone said, they could switch categories rapidly.
Oh I love my little old ladies who speak gibberish to each other but are having a grand old conversation together. We had a pair that used to hold hands when they talked.
My favorite lady looooves to eat. She never eats during the day. At night (when I work) she gets up and says in this funny little voice, "Ya got anything to eat?!" So she eats meal #1: sandwich, milk, and of course cookies because if you don't bring her cookies she gets this look in her face and says, "Don't ya have any cookies?!" Then she'll say, "What time is it?" And it'll be like 2 am and when you tell her her eyes get HUGE and she says, "Oh my God. Well I'm going back to bed. Good night." Sometimes she makes it back to bed and will come back out a couple hours later. Sometimes we don't see her at all again. And sometimes she forgets what she's doing and halfway back to her room she turns around, finds me at the nurses' station and says, "Ya got anything to eat?!" The most I've seen her eat were 5 meals, each containing a sandwich, a carton of milk, and, of course, cookies. They couldn't understand why she was suddenly gaining weight even though I reported what she ate every night.
Then she got pneumonia really bad and now she hardly ever gets up. On nights you only have a couple staff members working, so you really don't want a lot of people up, but we are all happy to see this little lady up. She's so sweet and so cute and always so HUNGRY lol.
i found this in a digest of recipes i subscribe to and thought it fit well in this thread.
just in case any of you is in need of something humorous in your day .....
it was a warm, sunny day so the recreation director at the nursing home
where my dad lives had them all out on the patio. dad was restless, so she
gave him the hose and set the nozzle onto a light spray and had him watering
all the pots of plants that were sitting around outside. my dad's sight isn
t the best, and when he was done watering the one bank of flowers, he turned
and started watering the other wall of pretty red blossoms. the only
problem was that what he had his hose aimed at were not flowers. they were
a couple of residents who were wearing brightly colored sweaters and were
sitting out on the patio in their wheelchairs! ! one woman started yelling,
no! no! no! i'm not a flower!!"
we have to learn how to be tolerant of confused residents, but i always think about how the residents have to learn to live with all these confused people or people who can't see or hear well. how funny! :)
I can't put my finger on why I love most of the residents. I just do. There was one lady who I was so attached to, it broke my heart when she died. She was annoying and most people couldn't stand her. They'd ask me what i saw in her and I could never tell them why- I just loved her.
We used to have 2 ladies who were best friends. They were ALWAYS together. And they weren't shy about talking sh*t about anyone who walked by. It was hilarious. Most of the time they'd be having a conversation with one another and each woman would be talking about a different subject and neither one of them knew it. Occasionally they would get into a fight and stop talking to each other. 10 minutes later they'd still be pouting in their rooms even though they'd both forgotten what the fight was about.
We had another lady who wore wigs and turbans. She was so tiny and cute, with big blue eyes. She rang her bell constantly over nothing (annoying!) because she just wanted attention. Then she'd talk your ear off. She was very sarcastic and swore constantly.
I also love one of our little ladies who is so pretty and has nice clothes. She could be in a foul mood and if you pay her a compliment about her appearance she puffs right up.
And we have several residents who "tell it like it is." If one of their roommates or someone at their dining table is being annoying they always say what I want to say but can't! I love it when I have to run out of the room laughing. Or when a resident puts ME in my place- like if I suggest they eat more of their lunch and they say "What are you a lunatic?"
Oh and we have another resident who makes up the craziest stories and gets stuck on them all day. Like one day she'll have herself convinced she'd had a wooden leg for 20 years. And she screams about it all day.
Specializes in OB, Peds, Med Surg and Geriatric Nsg.
Working at LTC, there are days that you just wanna quit in a heartbeat and there are days that you just wanna be there, comforting your residents 'till they close their eyes and go to heaven.
I have a demented patient with aggressive behaviors and a diabetic, she is known to be physically and verbally abusive to the staff at dayshift. Though during my shift, she has no behaviors at all and always quiet. One time when the staff were returning the residents from the dining hall, an aide pushed her wheelchair and left her at the hall behind the food cart. I was close to the food cart and heard a cry, when turned around I didn't see anything except a food cart. Continued preparing my meds when I heard the cry again, this time, I went closer to the food cart only to see her there teary eyed and feeling helpless because she can't pass by. I wheeled her back to her room, as I was preparing to lock the wheels of her chair, she grabbed my face firmly with her two hands and by that time, I thought I would be smacked on the face-- I closed my eyes and brace myself on what is about to happen only to be surprised that she gave me a kiss on the forehead. I would never forget that day when she told me, "Thank you little sweet girl." I left the room with a smile on my face knowing that I made her feel better.
Forever Sunshine, ASN, RN
1,261 Posts
I knew this would be a good idea!
One of my favorites is extremely agitated..yells, gets up out of her chair, and her mind goes faster than her mouth so her sentences are all garbled. She will lash out at most people who try to calm her down. I stop and say hi to her when I see her out in the hall and her face just lights up. They pass by with her and I see someone waving at me in the corner of my eye and its her waving and I make a big deal of her presence and she loves it.
Another one of my favorites is also a dementia patient who thinks she still lives at home. She gets up out of bed at night to turn all the lights off because of the electric bill. Another time during the day shift they were doing construction down the hall and she heard what sounded like knocking. I hear her say "Hold on I'll be right there" She goes to get up and her chair alarm goes off. I run over to her and make her sit back down and she said "Oh but theres someone at the door I have to answer the door".. She also drinks wine with dinner. I bought her wine to her one night and she said "Oh excellent." lol The whole room laughed.