Reflecting on the last few months for me personally, I am so drained. I am a nurse who works in a nursing home caring for residents that people have long forgotten about. This doesn’t just include the elderly (though people act like they’re out of sight and out of mind nothing in LTC facilities and in the community. It also includes people who have had strokes, severe medical conditions restricting movement to the point that another person (or sometimes several people) have to wash them and feed them. We have people who have developmental disabilities and people who have gastric, foley and superpubic catheters to either ensure they receive an adequate about of food and water, able to excrete their waste (nephrostomies also do this too as well as colostomies). People who have been forgotten about and/or they don’t have loved ones to advocate for them or their loved ones have decided to leave them at our facility and not return anyone’s calls or mail.
These are the people I care for when I am at work. They, like many others were hit hard by COVID-19 and either died or became very ill and never fully went back to their baseline. We do have a few that did make a full recovery but just a few.
I myself was diagnosed with COVID-19 due to being exposed at work. So were many of my coworkers some of which never came back to work out of sickness, fear and honestly both. I don’t blame them. We all have families that we worry about.
I just wonder sometimes the way people talk about nursing homes if anyone truly worries about the residents besides their families and staff.
We live in a world that is built around tearing others down. Now is any nursing home perfect? No, no one is perfect. But I think the focus should be on how you can support families, people living in nursing homes because the way the COVID-19 numbers are running, there will likely be another surge and there maybe more dead in nursing homes and the community. I pray not but I also see many people to wearing masks when they’re out and about and also not wearing them properly (covering your nose and mouth at the same time).
A Black Female Nerd 