Lynn Grippo
Phoenix, AZ
The Other Side of Christmas
Newly divorced, I was doing quite well for my children and myself. I worked as a paralegal in an attorney’s office. But after my employer’s wife gave birth to her eighth child, she decided to return to the office and I found myself scrambling for another job. I was desperate to take anything and the first offer to come along was in a nursing home.
I had no certification, but they paid minimum wage to start and assured me the big bucks would start rolling in upon completion of their in-house training. Every year, they would say we’d missed the deadline for certification or that the State Nursing Board wasn’t testing that year. We never became certified and were trapped in the black-hole job by the shamefully low pay. Even so, I learned to truly care for the other people who were trapped there—the residents.
In the Alzheimer’s unit of a senior nursing home, people forget their loved ones, their own names, even how to chew and swallow. But the one thing they always react to is touch. I may have hated the job, but there was something special about each patient. No matter how frantically busy I was, I’d always tuck my patients in for the night with a little kiss on the forehead. They went to sleep with smiles.
One afternoon I used my break time to sit with an elderly woman who was in mortal terror of dying. Her call button was ignored by busy NAs, and she cried all the time. I held her hand, not knowing whether she could still feel my grasp, and I listened to her talk about her horror of dying alone. I told her that from my experience working with people near death, they were never alone because a loved one from the other side always came to meet them. Such experiences of the near dead are only the intermittent sparking of synapses but some don’t accept the scientific theory. It seemed to calm her and hopefully it helped her that night. For when I returned to work in the morning, I discovered she’d passed several hours before. Her roommate was eating breakfast in bed, oblivious to the dead body that was lying one bed over. The old woman was to remain there for several more hours, as it was the doctor’s day off, and he didn’t want to give up his time on the links.
One eye was closed in peace. The other one remained open, still seeming to cling to the living world. Out of respect, I closed her eye. Immediately, the Charge Nurse censured me. Didn’t I know the body was notto be touched until the doctor came and pronounced her?
But I was good at my job and didn’t get fired. In fact, when the holidays came along, she remembered I was good with even the most cantankerous patients and they needed all the help they could get. The Holidays brought friends and family that hadn’t visited in months, suddenly showing up with cookies, candy, baked goods. Then with their guilt assuaged, they vanished back into the woodwork until the next holiday.
As an uncertified Nursing Assistant, holidays meant extra money, and even minimum wage OT is nice. I ran myself ragged, even doing a couple of 24-hour shifts. I worked round the clock and two hours before I was to leave, I was hurrying down the hall one minute, and the next, I was on the floor looking up at people who were looking down at me. I had literally fallen asleep on my feet.
Christmas Eve turned out to be a horror. We were short-handed, a nurse and two NAs for a hundred-bed unit. Administration and anyone with seniority had taken the holiday off to spend at home. With all the Christmas goodies, most of the patients had the runs all week but no one had thought of ordering additional supplies. As soon as we cleaned one, there were several more that were soiled. We ran out of diapers early on, necessitating emergency measures—towels, pillowcases, bed sheets.
There was no one to call in the middle of the night, so we were finally forced to let them lie in their own feces until a person of authority arrived next morning.
The Charge Nurse offered to let me go home, but I knew that would leave them short, a danger to both staff and residents. So I remained. After all, I thought, I only have two more hours to go and the paycheck would be greatly welcome.
The last charge of the night was getting a particularly mean old man up for his shower. I didn’t blame him for refusing a chilly bath 5 a.m. but he was filthy and reeking. I asked the other NA to help me and together we got him out of bed. But just before we could plop him into the shower chair, he began flailing about, yanking out a patch of my hair, cracking my nose, and popping the other woman in the eye. We called for help but the overwhelmed nurse never heard.
Desperation and fear gave us the strength to wrestle the old farmer down. He was 6’5” and 300 pounds. There were no Hoyer lifts in those days, all we had was muscle. Finally, we let him stay in bed and went to the Charge Nurse. She said she would report the incident but we knew she never would. Accidents and injuries were commonly ignored, and no witness ever came forward for fear of jeopardizing her job.
The sting from my cracked nose kept the adrenaline going but my body was so tired I could feel it dragging. I’d done my best but I just couldn’t do it any more. Whatever lay ahead, I was steeled to deal with it.
“See you tomorrow night?” the Charge Nurse asked. I just smiled and said, “Merry Christmas,” and walked out.
The Christmas dawn was crisp and cool, sunrise sprawling magnificent color swatches across the sky. I sucked in the chill, cleared my senses and sinuses. I would never inhale the scent of feces and dying bodies, wash dirty diapers with my bare hands, never suffer in silence again. When I got home, my children were already awake and tearing open their presents. “Merry Christmas, Mom!” And I knew that this Christmas morning had a new meaning: one door had slammed shut but I knew another would open soon. Merry Christimas.
THE END
Back to the Top
Nickel & Dimed in the Southwest
Back to the Lobby