Writing

THE BAD ONES #02

/ jonathanrobb / 1 Comment

I was visiting to admit him, a skinny Indian man recently returned from hospital. He was sixty, and previous to his recent surgery had been completely independent. He’d had years of back pain and recently gone in for a surgery designed to relieve pressure in his lower vertebrae. Unfortunately, during the operation, damage had been done to his nerves resulting in a neurogenic bladder. He had lost the ability to consciously relax the sphincter between his bladder and urethra, thereby releasing urine. In other words, he could no longer piss on command.

I was there to educate him on the catheter that had been inserted to ensure his bladder could still empty. I went through the usual process of introduction and listening to his recount of events before beginning to detail how to properly care for his new urinary system. He stopped me, and asked instead if I could remove his catheter.

After digesting his request I explained that couldn’t do as he asked, that without a catheter his bladder would continue to fill, that the pressure in his renal system would build and he’d be in extreme discomfort, and, if left unrelieved, could damage his kidneys.

Again, he stopped me, shaking his head and waving his hands, dismissing what I’d said. He told me that if I removed the catheter he would urinate. He assured me that if he could just relax, he could get a flow going.

I begun explaining about his neurogenic bladder, and again he cut me off, eyes closed and head shaking. ‘They have told me this in the hospital,’ he said. ‘But I know my body. If you take it out, I will be able to pee.’

I empathised with his difficulty in coming to terms with his new disability, but felt a bloom of frustration open in my gut. I tried again.

I explained, patiently, that in fact he’d had the opportunity while in hospital to do exactly that, that the hospital staff had removed his catheter and after an hour had scanned his bladder and found a litre of urine inside his body and not a drop out. I reminded him that they done this on two separate occasions, a week apart, and each time he’d been unable to void.

He was frowning now, jaws clenched as he waved his hands in front of my face. ‘I couldn’t do it there!’ he said. ‘There was too much pressure, with their machines, and their waiting. I am home now. I can do it now.’

I bit down my exasperation while requesting he not interrupt me, and to lower his hands, and explained that anyone with conscious control of their bladder would be able to pee if they had a litre of urine pushing down on their sphincter. He interrupted me.

‘No! Take it out and I will show you. I don’t want it anymore.’

This conversation continued for an hour. Despite my argument that it was in his best interest to keep the catheter in, he continued to command me to take it out. I told him that once the catheter was out, and he failed to urinate, he would be in agony. That his bladder would feel like it was ready to rupture and there would be no one around to insert a new catheter to relieve it. That he’d have to return to the hospital, something he insisted he wouldn’t do.

I explained that I wasn’t saying this to antagonise him, only that it was the truth. He rebutted with threatening to pull the catheter out.

By this point, over the hill of vexation and down again, I couldn’t repress a chuckle. A catheter has a balloon in the tip with a diameter of about four centimetres to hold it in place in the bladder. A male urethra has the diameter of about one centimetre. Pulling out a catheter without the balloon deflated is a painful process.

I detailed this, using the simile of pulling an apricot through a straw, and recommend that he not try it. He told me he would do as he liked.

In the end I slumped back in my seat and said I wouldn’t do what he wanted. He told me to leave.

When I got back to the office I contacted the hospital and informed them of the outcome of my visit, and they madly scrambled to have an ambulance and a bed ready if he did remove his catheter. I hung up the phone annoyed that they had to work harder to compensate for this man’s idiocy.

It’s hard to fight to save someone from themselves. It’s hard when their voice is raised and respect is gone, and you’re debating reason while they’re debating stubborn ignorance. It’s hard to keep caring about their wellbeing when they don’t care about your professional knowledge. And it’s easy to think, ‘Why don’t I just leave them to the consequences of their actions?’

He was one of the bad ones.

THE BAD ONES #01

/ jonathanrobb / 1 Comment

My brother pointed out to me the other day that I don’t tell the stories of the bad ones, that on my site I’ve shared many stories of the good patients I’ve met, but have failed to document the more sour interactions. He, of course, has heard countless stories of exasperating patients, of those people I visit who have deemed themselves free of the need to conform to the social norms of politeness, respect, and quiet often, hygiene. His observation was accurate — it was with deliberate intent that I excluded those episodes from this site.

But after the discussion I realised that by focusing only on the uplifting exchanges, I’m not accurately portraying my profession, and in a larger sense, my community. Laborious and infuriating personalities make up the web of society as much as, and sometimes more than, the pleasant. By ignoring this branch of humanity I’m also ignoring the insights and experiences that come with them, as distasteful as those insights and experience can be.

So here we go…

 

The inside of her house was lined with a layer of dust and cat hair, an accumulation of years. It was something I couldn’t just see and smell, but could taste, to the point that simply breathing in the air felt like a fouling act. It was as if each breath was coating the insides of my lungs with its own layer of dried skin flakes and moulted cat fur.

I was there to attend to wounds on her lower legs. She was forty-five years old; young, given the average age of our clientele. She had wounds due to years of uncontrolled diabetes — the consistent high level of sugar in her blood had killed the micro-vessels in her legs, reducing the amount of oxygenated blood delivered to her skin. Without proper circulation, her skin integrity weakened and ulcers developed, which then failed to heal due to the same poor quality circulation that caused them.

It’s importance to stress that in her case “uncontrolled diabetes” isn’t a reference to undiagnosed diabetes. The patient had known of her condition and had had years of doctors and medical specialists educating her on the necessary exercise and dietary requirements needed to manage her disease. She weighed one-hundred and fifteen kilograms and her blood sugar results were perpetually high.

This was not a picture of a woman who had heeded medical advice.

She scooped four cats from her single bed, throwing them out the door, before falling face first onto the mattress so I could attend to her wound care. Her bulk filled the bed, her affected legs sticking out like twin wrapped hams. I peeled away the soaked and soiled dressings while she complained about how her wounds wouldn’t heal. Her limbs were stretched tight with oedema and yellow slimy pockets of broken skin rung her calves, the angry red edges like bruised and swollen lips.

I looked around her house, breathing shallow breaths, focusing on the decade worth of dirt that coated her home. Dirt that a half-an-hour vacuum once a week could have avoided. That a thirty-second swipe of a cloth could have wiped away at the time, but instead, years of voluntary neglect had accumulated into a stain that could only really be cleansed with fire. I took in these details and wondered if it was worth explaining for the hundredth time ways in which she could aid her own wound healing. Ways such as losing weight, eating a well-balanced diet, exercise, and stopping the consumption of soft drinks.

I began, knowing the words would be wasted, but she cut me off.

‘Yeah, yeah, I know all that. Every nurse goes on about it. I’m just sick of it.’

I fought to resist asking why then does she still spend her days eating chips on a couch that has moulded into the shape of her body.

A colleague of mine once decided she would wear this patient down with positive enthusiasm. She went in offering support and encouragement. She sat and talked to her about how we would help her heal her wounds if she would only help us. That we would aid her every day to bring her weight down and correct her diet. That it didn’t have to be a monumental thing, but just small acts done daily. Acts like walking to the letterbox.

Her letter box was ten meters from her door, and my colleague suggested that when she had finished tending her wounds, she walk with her to the letterbox on the way out as a form of exercise. The patient agreed.

Once she had dressed the patent’s wounds and hoisted her work bag, my co-worker said,

‘Come on, then. Walk me to the letterbox.’

The patient sat on the couch, looking at the nurse as she thought about it, then responded with a shrug,

‘Nah.’

It’s hard to care about another person’s health when they don’t care about it themselves. It’s hard to squat and lift heavy legs, to scrap muck away from weeping wounds, to walk into a home that makes you feel ill when the other party isn’t doing their fair share. And it’s too easy to think, ‘Why am I bothering when they aren’t?’

She was one of the bad ones.

SNAPSHOT #03

/ jonathanrobb / Leave a comment

She smiled, a grin of genuine contentment, someone at peace with who they are and the decisions they’ve made. She wore her dressing gown like an evening dress, and sipped her tea like royalty. I organised her medications and she talked while I worked, a pleasant bubbling of words and stories, her actions energetic and youthful.

I asked her what her secret was, and she told me,

“I was born in 1919. I’ll be ninety-five this year, and I walk two miles everyday.”

She winked and her brows danced.

“If you don’t use it, you lose it.”

snapshot 03

WORK OF A DIFFERENT KIND/SPOKEN

/ jonathanrobb / 3 Comments

Six months ago I put up a poem I’d written about a patient of mine who had Lewy Body dementia. The piece detailed the first visit I made to her house and my interaction with her and her husband, and how they were coping with her condition.

I was happy with the poem, satisfied that it accurately portrayed the visit while also working as a piece of poetry. The only problem I discovered was that not many people realised it was actually a poem.

In their defence, it is a free verse poem, and a particularly wordy one at that. The other issue is that poems are really designed to be performed so that you can hear the rhythm that’s been built into the words.

With this in mind, as well as resurrecting my piece, I’ve recorded my performance of the poem for anyone who was interested in how it was meant to sound.

Enjoy.

THE FACEBOOK FACADE

/ jonathanrobb / 1 Comment

Is inaccurate self-representation affecting our perception of realistic success? This is a question I’ve been asking myself. The catalyst: Facebook.

Recently I’ve been in multiple conversations with friends about the power of Facebook, and how the impact it has on our lives is not always a positive thing. Given that I found myself continually drawn to this topic I thought it best to write it out.

Let me begin by saying I think Facebook is an incredible tool. The ability to maintain contacts and friendships, to share elements of our lives with the people we care about, to create a virtual gathering place where I can see pictures of my new niece or reconnect with old friends is astounding. And already it is evolving.

The addition of the share feature is transforming the way I use Facebook. Now the virtual gathering place is also a place to share ideas, to read articles and discuss them, to bring awareness to people who might be interested in various activities and organisations. Our discovery of new concepts and thoughts has sped up, and each time I check my newsfeed I can find something new to interest me. Even better, I choose whose shared articles and videos populate my newsfeed, meaning I tailor it to the opinions of those I care about.

This selective nature of Facebook allows me to eliminate the offensive or uninteresting elements I might find on more traditional sources of news. My newsfeed is exactly that: The news I choose to feed myself. But this option of an edited worldview cuts both ways, because it is still being driven by people with an ulterior motive.

Most of the time the motive of my friends and family is simply to display things of interest and joy. But inherently this creates the illusion that things are all interest and joy, and it extends, not only to what they share about other topics, but also what they share about themselves. The power behind Facebook and the profiles we create about ourselves is the ability to project whatever image we like, regardless of accuracy.

The best example of this I can think of is the checking-in option. I presume this option was made available to share with the people in our life exactly where we are and what we’re doing, although why this information is necessary to share with all contacts at once has escaped me. But this in itself is no bad thing. The problem arises when people become desperate to convince the world of their thriving social life. They advertise themselves as fun-loving party animals because there is the expectation that this is what they should be. That this lifestyle equals success. And, sadly, like most advertisements, it is riddled with half-truths.

We can’t all be fun-loving party animals, and we can’t be fun-loving party animals all the time. We have lives that need maintenance, jobs to fund our social outings, we get exhausted, and need down time. But when we indulge in this downtime, curl up on the couch with a laptop and peruse our newsfeed, we discover everybody else is out having a good time. We find photos of parties and holidays, checked-in locations of clubs and pubs we didn’t even know existed, and people tagged so everyone knows they partook in the good time.

If I was to believe my newsfeed I would have to concede that the lives of the people I know are nothing but restaurants and nights out, vacations and parties. And I would face the morbid realisation that my life is nothing like that.

And this is where the negative influence of all these good intentions can hit. People see the staggering weight of positive experiences and believe this is what life should be. They get depressed that their life is not composed of an endless string of ups, and feel pathetic and boring by comparison. And what do they do? They make sure the next time they’re out they check themselves in. They proliferate the illusion that happiness and success is determined by the quality of their social life in an attempt to convince people that they’re keeping up. And the irony is everyone else is doing the same. Everyone is logging on, seeing the revelry the rest of the world is having, then convincing themselves and others they’re part of it, thereby perpetuating a misconstrued reality.

This desire to keep up spreads into what photos we share, our upbeat statuses, and the things we like. Every time we add a stroke to our Facebook profile we make sure it represents the ideal us. We wait to see the amount of likes our input gets, using it as a barometer of popularity and a comfort that we are measuring up. We define our self-worth by the clicks of a mouse.

This one-sided persona we are all creating is damaging because it’s one that’s impossible to live up to. It is breeding a necessity to continually tag and check and share to maintain our disguise, but it’s artificial. Yes, we have times of genuine fun, but by feeding this and focusing solely on this we are ignoring half of ourselves. We need to embrace the quieter moments and place as much value on introspection and rehabilitation as we currently are on externalisation and socialisation.

I don’t know how we achieve this through the medium of social networking, and I’m not suggestion the solution is to broadcast when we feel shitty and anti-social, or upload photos of ourselves binge-eating on the couch watching crappy television. Although, perhaps if we did, we would realise a lot more of us do it than we care to admit.

But I do think that if we absolutely must advertise our lives then one day it would be nice to see a newsfeed populated with people checking in the current book they’re reading, status updates comprised of self-reflective thought, or photos of quiet nights in. I think this would go a long way towards bringing the balance back to Facebook, and a balance to our expectations of a normal life.