"Furniture Disease"

 


This reminds me of the days before I became an LPN. I was working as a CNA.

I got this elderly female dementia patient out of bed, and dressed her in a button-up shirt, and a pair of slacks, getting her ready for breakfast. I sat her in her Geri-Chair, and started to leave the room to get the next patient out of bed.

This patient was almost always in some state of agitation, but this particular morning, she had an unusually frustrated look on her face, she was yelling out, and she was frantically clawing at her pants.  She hadn't put the words together to formulate a complex sentence in several years, so we had to get our clues as to what was bugging her by her body language and her general demeanor. 

As I got closer to the door, her agitation increased to the point that I realized this wasn't a usual 'fit', but that she REALLY needed attention.

I walked over to her Geri-chair, and pulled on the front of the elastic in her pants. She fell back in the chair, looked extremely grateful to me, and did muster "Th-Th-Thank you, H-H-Honey!"

I gave her the diagnosis of "Furniture Disease" = Her chest met her drawers!

(Her boobs were caught in her pants!)

From that day forward, I made sure 'nothing' was trapped in her pants that wasn't supposed to be trapped in her pants before I left her room!
I also took care of a 92 yr. old man who was a 'bit' impatient when it came to waiting for his turn to be put to bed at night.  

Even though he shouldn't have been attempting to put himself to bed, he would often go into a 'pout' that we all recognized, and he would crawl ON TO the bed.  We would walk by his room, and see him on his knees in his bed, bare butt up in the air, sticking out of his open gown, and aimed towards the door, with his head down on the bed, sleeping (much like a baby sleeps on his knees).

Besides purposefully being unashamed of being bare-assed to the world, he had another problem:
More often than not, he was KNEELING ON HIS SCROTUM!

(GOD GOD, GERTIE!)

I would walk into his room, and tell him, "Mister, even though it probably does hurt me to look at you kneeling on your own scrotum more than it does for you to actually do it, physically, the pain has to be greater for you more than it is for me!  you're hurting yourself more than you are hurting me."

We had a couple gents on that floor that we had to take measures to ensure that their equipment, was outside the toilet or commode to avoid having it hit the bottom of the toilet / commode!  

I have only one question:
Why is all of this 'junk' wasted on the elderly?
he he he

- Michael