Forget the pills, give me a friend.
This is a tale from my placement at a residential care facility, M hospital.
Every Monday night, from four thirty to eight thirty the timetable is the same. The clock is an absolute, with the resident’s desires having little effect on its power. The first hour is dinner time. The next couple of hours are when the residents are helped in the bed. Lastly, the final hours nearing 8.30 the residents doze off to sleep with the occasional calls of help to the caregivers.
Every week it’s the same. The only variations possible amongst the daily routine are the human interactions. You just have to strain to notice the changes. The conversations seldom go beyond the weather, the request for help and the awkward small talk to fill the even more awkward silences. What’s surprising is how much the residents enjoy these conversations. It didn’t matter that the topic of conversation was insignificant, the actual act of conversations was far more important.
There is a certain lady’s room that I take food and dessert to everyday. The sound of coarse breathing escaping her room makes it hard to miss amongst the 47 rooms at M hospital. Her muscles can no longer take her out of her room, and can barely open her eyes as she looks to see who has entered the room. As I proceed with my job of feeding her, we struck a chord, and it gave me the opportunity to timidly ask her what makes her happy in her life. I hesitated with the question, afraid I would be drawing attention to the abundant despair I had witnessed at the hospital. After a long pause, her answer made my heart sink “I can’t think of anything that makes me happy.”
Shortly after, she finished her meal, I started walking out of her room, only to hear a quiet “Thank you…” and in the brief moment I turned to acknowledge her thanks for my feeding her, she finished her sentence “…for the talk.” This subtle difference breathed life back into my belief for palliative care, even if it differed from M hospital’s approach. I had experienced, even if it was for a brief moment, the strength of this small attempt at the care for their illness, not just the disease.
The illness model focuses on much more than the pathological effects on a person with consideration of mental and social well-being. Yet this residential care facility focuses on the pathological effects on the person, helping solely with the physical disabilities associated with the disease. This can’t be considered enough, especially when the care restricts the patient’s ability to self-fulfil with a strict timetable and difficult accessibility to people.
The best time I had at M hospital was an hour and a half with J. I had no agenda, no interview questions, just a suggestion by my caregiver to keep him company and a couple of beers. I had a slight apprehension of entering his room without a purpose, but it was soon erased as he answered yes with a smile to my company. J has a problem with communicating, his words difficult to decipher. I thought it would be detrimental to our time together, but it was a source of great laughter as our conversation became an altered version of charades.
I think J’s smiles, and laughter goes deeper than the hilarity of my oft-wrong guesses, but it was more his appreciation that I was trying. This was the only time I heard laughter from a resident here, and it sounded so beautiful. This hour and a half, I wasn’t his aid, I was his friend. I came in with no specific job to do as a health professional, and left with the realization of the importance of the social and psychological needs of a person. In retrospect, I did have a job to do as a health professional.
