Prior to my current nursing job I mostly took care of patients who were in their young to middle adulthood. The patients I work with now are generally in their middle to late adulthood. They are often elderly, very elderly, or even downright ancient. It has been a new experience for me and one that I enjoy very much. If a person has lived for eighty or ninety years and is still gutsy enough and healthy enough to choose to have a big surgery, the odds are they have always been gutsy and have lived through all kinds of adversity and strife with a sense of humor and a lot of grit. I consider it a great privilege to care for elderly patients.
Of course every patient deserves our best efforts as nurses, but I often think that the elderly patients, through sheer perseverance, have earned even more than that. Taking especially good care of the elderly seems like paying it way, way, way forward, because I hope to be elderly myself at some point and it also feels like a way to say thank you. Having Grandpa John living with us has not changed this for me, but it has opened my eyes to something I had not realized before. If a person has lived eighty or ninety years and they still have their wits about them, they have had eighty or ninety years of figuring things out. They may agree that they deserve certain privileges and special considerations because of their age.
I am not talking about basic care – someone to prepare your meals, do your laundry, set out your meds, or drive you to your appointments. We do those things for Grandpa John as a matter of course because it makes things easier for him and it’s not much trouble for us.
But being the senior member of the family also gives Grandpa some percs. He feels free to comment on our lives and offer advice. He tells the complete truth as he sees it, without wasting any energy on diplomacy.
Say a certain person is whining that she can’t seem to lose any weight. He will not say, "Oh, you look great," or "I know, it’s so hard." He will say, "Then quit eating so much." And you can’t argue with that. Because it is 100% right. You want to lose weight, you quit eating so much. BAM! He recently told the doctor I wasn’t a very good cook. And what could I do about that? Nothing! I told him that he’d embarrassed me and he said, "Well?" Like, "Well then, start cooking better."
Grandpa John also retains complete control of the television from eight-thirty each morning until around nine o’clock each evening. And that’s all there is to that. If you want to watch something besides what he wants to watch you can go in the other room or you can ask him.
If you ask him to watch something he is just as likely to say no as to say yes. He is also likely to change the channel just as they are going to announce how much weight Freddy lost or which girl Jules has decided to ask to marry him. And that’s the way it goes. Because he is the oldest. He is in charge. He lived through the Depression and World War II. And that’s all she wrote. You can’t really argue with that. "Grandpa! I was watching that!" "Yeah? You ever have to eat pigeons? Are you speaking German right now? No? Then we’re watching Wheel of Fortune. Live with it."
Living with it has opened my eyes. Previously I must admit that I just thought that the predominant feature of the elderly was their extreme cuteness. Now I know that while they might be cute, they are cute like foxes. I was at the customer service counter at the grocery store the other day behind a cute little old lady with a moderately full basket of groceries. It wasn’t full, but she defiantly had more than five items. "I would like a book of stamps please."
Ahh, how cute she is! She’s going to get a book of stamps and then she will take her groceries over to a cashier and get in line to pay for them! Look how tiny she is! See how perfectly her little lavender curls are arranged on her tiny little head. So cute! But then she proceeded to unload her entire cart up onto the little customer service counter.
Except for the heavy things, like the Pop Tarts, which the clerk had to scan in the basket. Which meant she had to leave her customer service cage through the customer service gate and down the customer service steps with the scanner. Which she did with apparent good humor.
I waited with relative patience and did not say a word or even sigh, or shift my weight or roll my eyes. Because she was so tiny and had such a sweet little voice and was so very, very, very old. I waited as she dug through her cute little purse for her adorable little checkbook (checkbook!) and carefully filled out the check in great and exacting detail in her Palmer Method penmanship, and THEN while she carefully recorded the transaction in her check register, which she kept in a different wallet than her checkbook which also had to be dug up from the depths of her purse, and then, as I waited and waited and watched and watched, she dug up yet another wallet to present her photo ID.
Then she turned around and looked at me and grinned. Her watery pale blue eyes actually glinted, her delicate crepey skin stretched and she gave me a grin. A big and somehow wicked grin. A grin that said, "Yeah, I know. But did you ever have to eat a pigeon? You speaking German right now? No? So live with it!"
