work, life, work, life, work, life

Well, I wasn't actually going to write a blog post today. I've been so busy that stopping to write just seemed like too much of a demand (and I'm in that mood where a blank white page seems like the most demanding thing in the world, just waiting for your words like a great big hungry...waiting thing), but seeing as my browser bizarrely won't load up anything but blogger.com, I guess something up there is telling me I ought to write a post.

But what about? Not having planned to, I've been caught unawares and un-prepared. 'Quick!' says the brain, 'think of something interesting!', but said brain refuses to provide me with even a snippet of an idea as to what that interesting thing might be.

I guess I could talk about my week, although that would possibly involve a re-definition of the term interesting. Possibly so that it meant something more like boring. Okay, so hold onto your hats, lets start typing and see where we end up.

My week. As you may or may not know, I work - at the moment - for a temp agency. This involves them ringing me up and saying 'this company needs someone in their office for two weeks, can you do that?' or 'this company needs someone to mind a showroom for them, can you do that? Oh, and - inexplicably - you'll also be handling all the trade accounts for the company, but we won't tell you that, we'll just let you figure it out.' The life of a temp is interesting, frustrating and involves many different jobs in a very short space of time. I've been temping for a while, and already I've been a shop person, the afore-mentioned showroom handler, a cook, and a few other jobs. My current job, however, takes the biscuit.

Now, after I left my long-term job, I was supposed to go and work for someone else, but unfortunately that fell through. That's how I ended up as a temp - I needed money, having just moved, and temping was a way to get into work quickly. I specifically asked them for office work, but they don't always have office work available and hey, I need to eat, so occasionally I find myself doing jobs that I wouldn't necessarily have chosen given different options. This, at the moment, is one such job.

Can't really say too much about it, as...well, the management are appalling but there should be a standard procedure with the government body that I'm working for that should require me to sign a basic confidentiality agreement because I'm working with (not really with, more around) patients (although they haven't made me sign one, nor have they shown me...well, anything. I didn't have a personal staff alarm till the second week because no-one remembered to get me one). Basically I clean. I work in a hospital that deals with people who are not quite all there. I actually work on the geriatric ward, so there's a lot of dementia and senility, with a smattering of Parkinson's and such-like. To begin with, I wasn't sure I'd be able to do the job. The cleaning involves patients bathrooms, and I, like some people, also find people with mental illnesses uncomfortable because I just don't know what to do. Plus, my mother was a nurse, and having been around nursing environments for a long, long time I became convinced fairly early on that it wasn't what I wanted to do with my life.

Anyway. I've been there for a while now, and it's not all that bad. You soon learn which people to look out for (and which people you shouldn't let trap you in their rooms), which people you can talk to and which you can try and talk to, but it's pretty much going to be a one-sided conversation. Some of them, I love. I won't use names, but some of them are fantastic. D, for example. D is pretty out there - last week she asked me what I was: I said "I'm the cleaner, D, and what are you?" and she said "I'm a fish! Or blue. I'm not sure which one." She always gives me a great big grin whenever I see her, and although she can become sullen and un-cooperative, she always smiles for me. Although I know it's not my place, I try and stop and say a few words with her every day. E likes me too, although he's convinced I'm a boy (the long hair and boobs don't seem to sway his opinion). He's very loud, very aggressive, and one of the ones it's best to keep on the right side of. Mrs P, C and G all make me sad. Mrs P has no out-ward signs of dementia - and I know the unit houses some people who are depressed with no other illnesses - and she and C always want to talk. They just seem to like conversation, be it about what I'm doing, what I did the night before, what they used to do, the weather, the other patients, anything really. All they want is someone to talk to, because the nurses don't talk to them and the other patients they can't talk to. I try and stop for as long as I can, but I have a job to do and the nurses look at you funny if you look like you're too interested in the patients; that's their job, and you'd better not forget it. Only thing is, in the time I've been there, I've never seen them really sit down and talk to the patients. C and I always have a conversation like this in the morning:

"Okay C, that's your hoovering done, you all set?"

"Yes, thank you. Are you leaving? Do you like my flowers? Someone bought them for me yesterday." And then we'll stop and chat about her flowers, or the weather, or whatever she's just bought up.

"I'll see you later, okay? I'll be back soon, remember, I still have to clean your bathroom, so I'll be back with my cleaning products and my rubber gloves in about half an hour."

And she smiles at me. "That'll be nice, dear. It'll give me something to look forward too."

She means it. C is pretty dependent on the nurses for mobility, and they leave her in her chair all day, staring out the window.

There's an art room I've never seen used. Ditto the cookery room. The OCT room is never in use, either. The patients sit in their rooms, or sometimes they're taken to sit in the corridor. If they can walk, they can roam around, and if it's a nice day, maybe they can go outside (E loves it outside. At the first sign of sun, he's out, on a bench, stripping down to his underwear and soaking up some rays. He's got a great tan). Now Mrs D, she can walk with a frame, but everyone knows she's a little unsteady, both mentally and physically. My cleaning supervisor and I were sat in an un-used lunch room having a break when we heard, after a while, a quiet wailing from outside. We opened the door, walked around the side of the building and found Mrs D clinging onto a post by the building, walking frame a good ten metres away on the path, in tears and clearly distressed. We got her a chair and eventually persuaded a nurse to come and get her with a wheel-chair. My supervisor told me, after we'd sat back down, that she'd seen Mrs D walking around the (mostly dis-used) side of the building ten minutes before I'd arrived, walking frame backwards, and not a nurse in sight. Time was, she said, that there'd always be a nurse outside, making sure the less steady patients were always okay, but now the nurses take out-side time to mean tea-break, and can always be found in the same lounge at the bottom of the ward.

Now, call me crazy, but something seems to be wrong with this picture. Which leads me neatly (or, you know, allows me to jump too) the subject of G. Now G is old, really really old. She can't get out of bed, move or do anything without assistance. But that's all she gets. Minimal assistance. She gets out of bed and they put her in her chair, in her room, and they put the television on. At night, they switch the television off, take her out of her chair and put her in bed. In the time (and it's been a while) that I've been there, I've seen her having an in-depth discussion with precisely one person. Now the thing is, it's easy to dismiss G. They do it, I do it. She calls for help constantly (and I do mean constantly). She bangs her table, she yells, she calls a certain name over and over again (the name, if I'm not mistaken, of the woman that I saw her having the conversation with). And when you go into her room, you'll have a conversation with her that goes very much like this:

"Come in, come in, come over here where I can see you."
"What's wrong, G?"
"I'm going to call the police; I have to get out of here. I have to get up and do something."

Or something very much along those lines. And it's easy, if you follow the nurses' lead (which to begin with I did), to dismiss her as yet another poor old lady who unfortunately is going to be in this condition till she dies. But I'm starting to wonder whether she's as poor and unfortunate as they think.

Last week, I had a conversation that went like this. "Hey, G, mind if I come in? I have to clean your bathroom."
"Come in, come in, come here."
"What's up, G?"
"I want to get up, I want to get out. They never take me out."
"I'm sorry, G, I wish there was something I could do. I'll go ask a nurse, okay?"

So I went out, went up to nurse and said. "I'm sorry to bother you, but G says she'd quite like to go out. She's always in her room." It was a gorgeous hot summer day.

The nurse gave me a look, as if to say that I'd over-stepped my bounds: what their patients want is, and will be, dictated by them. "Well, it's nearly lunch, we'll get her some lunch in her room and then we'll take her out. Tell her lunch in ten minutes." I had a bad feeling in my stomach, like nervous/uncomfortable, but I nodded because who the hell am I? I'm just the cleaner.

"They said lunch is in ten minutes, G, and then they'll take you out."

She paused, and then said. "It's a pack of lies."

"I'm telling you what they told me, G, honest."

"I know that you're not lying, you're a good girl. They're lying to you. They're not going to do it. They never do."

And sure enough, twenty minutes later when I passed her room there was no lunch and no wheel-chair in sight.

Today, when I went into her room, she stopped me again. She'd been increasingly agitated in the morning, showing behaviours I'd never seen her display before, and this is the conversation I had.

"Morning, G."
"Hello, hello, come here where I can see you, who are you?"
"I'm the cleaner, remember? I'm H."
"Come here, come here." So I knelt down beside her chair. "I want to get out of here. I...you know what? I'm so bored. So very, very bored."
"I...I'm sorry, G."
"Bored bored bored bored. They never let me do anything. They pick me up and they put me down and then they forget about me. They don't talk to me. I'm so bored I could cry." There were tears in her blue eyes. "No-one knows what it's like. I think I shall go mad."
"I...I wish there was something I could do."
She paused, and very gently took my hand. "I know you do. You're a good girl. Please, let me get up and do something. Let me get out of here. What do you do?"
"I'm the cleaner here; I clean all the rooms. It's my job."
"I want to help. I want to get up and do something; I want to be useful. Please, what can I do?"
"I, I don't know." I was feeling a little upset at this point, guilty and scared and mad and and, "I don't know. What would you like to do?"
"I want to be useful. I want to get up. I want to do something."
I don't know why I said it, but, "Can you sew? Knit? I can't, I'm useless. Can't sew at all."
"I can sew. I like sewing." It seemed to calm her down, thinking about something like that.
"What did you do, G, for work? Where did you live?" All of a sudden, I wanted to know. I wanted to know who this shadow had been. I saw a person, all of a sudden. Someone just like me. Someone who was me, in 50 years.
"I worked, I did. I lived here, in this city," she named it and I smiled.
"I live here too."
Then the smile went when she said. "Please. Won't you ask them if I can get up?"
"I'll try." And I did. I went and asked, knowing it was fruitless and pointless.
And then I did something cowardly. I went back in and said. "I'm sorry, G. I'm sorry, and I have to go. I have more rooms to clean."
"Please don't go. What is that? What is that?" She pointed to the hoover, and I brought it closer so she could see.
"It's my vacuum, industrial sized. I do all the rooms with it."
"Please, I want to use it. I want to do something." She reached out before I could stop her and touched it. "Please."
"I'm sorry, G, really I am, I have to go."
"Stay. I'll pay you. I'm your boss now and you can do whatever you like, so stay." I gently took the hoover away and started edging back.
"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I have other rooms to clean. I have to get back to work."
"No, please don't go. I'm so bored, so bored and lonely." And she began punctuating her words with slaps to her own forehead. "I worked, I worked my whole life for this. What can I do? Please. I want to be with you. Take me with you."
"I don't know, I don't know what you can do, G. I'm sorry."
"I could scream."

And later that day, as I was rushing between jobs, I heard her screaming. I passed her door and saw her calling for help, hitting herself on the forehead. Both these actions - the scream and the slaps - were new for her, or at least new for me to see from her. And the nurses didn't go to her. The only one who did was a new student doing an work experience segment, who I'm sure, by the end of the week, won't go in to her anymore.

Call me mrs koo-koo crazy pants, but what was wrong with the picture now becomes clearer. Seems to me that if you work - and this isn't an indictment of all those in the mental health caring profession, merely of the nurses in that particular place - with these people too long, you seem to forget they are people. And it's easily done. I can feel it creeping up on me every time I block out G when I walk past, or M who yells everything three times, or Mrs D who mumbles, or the Michael Jackson music which is one of the only things that seems to calm down D. There just seems, in my eyes, to be something wrong not only with the attitude of the nurses, but with the whole system. It's not just that there's no inclination to spend time with the patients: I'd place money on the fact that half the younger nurses were not trained or encouraged to in the first place. I know that it's a very human reaction to be, essentially, lazy. To not put ourselves out there when we could, or to shy away from the hard in favour of the easy whilst telling ourselves that that's not what we're doing at all. But I can't even believe that if I worked there, I would get so inured to the surroundings that I would ignore another human being who just wanted what we all so desperately need: companionship, kindness, and someone to complain about the weather with.