Our Land: Getting Old part 1

 

Today’s Our Land author almost needs no introduction. For regular followers of this series, you know my deep-thinking, amazing, brilliant, and, at times, tormented friend Lizzi from Considerings. For those of you who do not know her, check her out, and read her previous Our Land contributions, here, and here. Lizzi not only Believes in Our Land (with a capitol B for Believes), but she practices it. Her writing makes her sound older than her years, and her life-view will leave you in awe of both her tenderheartedness and her wisdom. Really. Go visit her. You won’t regret it, I promise.

She’s amazing. She’s also the one that drew me to attend Clark’s vidchat, on Friday nights, which I highly recommend.

Our Land: Getting Old Part 1:

Home of the Living Dead (part one of a two-part Our Land) (WHOOT!)

The first job I found myself in, having left school, was working as a minimum-wage employee in a care home for the elderly. I hated myself for taking the job, even as I knew that I was desperate, owed some housekeeping, and was willing to plumb the very depths for ready cash.

I rocked up on my first day and realised the full awfulness of what I’d signed up to. In the ensuing three weeks (shamefully, that was as long as I stuck at it) I learned more and worse about what can happen inside one of these death-houses than I ever wanted to.

It broke my heart and left a deep and profound impression on me.

I was one of very few English people who worked there in the lower rungs of the hierarchy. Most of the staff were cheery and bright (and could speak English well), but not all of them. As I recall, the residents were all white English. The disparity stuck with me because it underlined so sharply how we, as a nation, seem to be all too ready to turn over our incapable elderly into the hands of caring foreigners and hard-up teenagers. Why don’t we care for them?

Though to be honest, the ‘care’ aspect might be rather a generous attribution. Three corridors of residents, one of which housed the highly dependent, all to be seen to by six workers.

Every morning, time tight by the constraints of the kitchen and the wafting smell of cheap, cooked food pervading the building, we’d briskly walk in, get the resident up and out of bed, trying to remember to say “Good morning” and use their name and smile at them, as policy dictated. We’d wash them, our latex-gloved hands clinically and efficiently manipulating their aged bodies, holding up arms, legs, feet, breasts, genitals and washing carefully with purpose-bought disposable cloths and warm, soapy water, before drying them and putting them in their clothes ready to be wheeled down to the room where we’d line the walls with them as they waited for breakfast.

I don’t remember being asked to introduce myself by name.

I was a stranger to them – a young, unknown kid, cleansing their most intimate parts, exposing them as little as I could, but nonetheless, required by my role to do so.

Taking them to the toilet was the worst. They seemed to all wait and suddenly need to go at once, and the workers would be hard pressed to manage the flow. Sometimes accidents happened, and then they were rolled back to their rooms to be washed and re-dressed, and their wheelchairs cleaned. And the floors.

By then it would be lunch time. And then we’d roll the more compos mentis down to the recreation room for some bought in ‘fun’. Then dinner time. Then we’d undo all we’d done in the morning and put them back into their beds.

In the evening I’d stagger home after a 12 hour shift, absolutely shattered and unable to purge the dour mood from my soul. Or the smell – that all-pervading stench of piss and faeces and death…ever clinging death, just watching, waiting around every corner. Standing guard over every bed. Because we all knew – even the residents knew – that they’d been signed over to our ‘care’ to wait, in the most convenient way possible, to die.

The incident which really put the skids under my time there was a day when I was assigned to work on the lower corridor – the high dependency section.

The residents there were severely disabled. Washing them in the mornings was a case of rolling them over, with one worker holding them still as the other scrubbed them. And in most cases, scrubbed the crusted faeces off their wrinkled arses, and applied cream to their sores, before moving them to a more comfortable position.

Breakfast was spoon-fed to them, without conversation (because they couldn’t, or wouldn’t) with one eye on the television (to counter both of theirs, fixed on it as they willed me (or, more likely, themselves) to not be there).

Not all of them were bed-bound, and some were moved from their beds into wheelchairs using a hoist, with straps which went around their upper back and under their arms, and two loops to go around each leg. They were hauled into the air and lowered into their waiting wheelchair. The same happened in reverse at the end of the day, or whenever they needed changing.

This particular morning, another worker and I were half-way through the process of getting one of these residents out of bed. We’d washed her and were ready to move her, but time was tight and I don’t think the mood was any more than perfunctory. We got the straps around her and lifted her out, aiming to put her into her wheelchair when all of a sudden, she started shitting, right there in the hoist.

She was hanging there, in her gown, with great gobbets of shit smacking wetly onto the floor, narrowly missing the wheelchair, which I swiftly moved away so it didn’t get hit. I looked at her face, feeling a sudden and overwhelming rush of horror and pity that her life had come to this – half-naked, suspended in mid-air and shitting all over the ground, in front of strangers.

And as I looked, that horror turned to heartsickness, because in her eyes there was nothing. She – whatever part of her it was that made her a person, a human – was gone. Buried away inside herself behind a defensive wall of apathy and blankness, protecting her from the excruciating humiliation her sense of dignity would have been reduced to, were she ‘present’ in this situation.

That was the day I knew the utter, devastating shame of a nation which hides its elderly and infirm behind closed doors, leaving them to die without having to see or care for them. A nation which is all too happy to abandon its progenitors, casting them off as though they were the ones to be ashamed of. A nation which treats a significant proportion of its elderly with a pitifully meagre amount of respect.

A nation I belong to.

That was the day I knew I could never work with old people again.

But I did, as you’ll see…

—

See? Stay tuned for part 2 and how this all fits into Our Land (Next Tuesday night – or Wednesday morning, depending on your timezone. And my ability to deliver). In the meantime, visit Lizzi and let her know how much she rocks. Here’s more about her:

Lizzi is a Deep Thinker, Truth Teller and Seeker of Good. She works a normal job and has a secret life as the writer at Considerings. Wife to Husby and Mother to two Neverborns, now dealing with the challenge of primary infertility, she is a frequent instigator of silliness and loves to entertain with words.

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