EDITOR’S NOTE: This column is the first part of two.
In late 1976 I came back to Ottawa from South America completely broke.
I took the first job offered to me, an aide in a nursing home. They assigned me to the men’s wing where I made beds, gave showers, emptied urinals and bedpans, and coaxed my guys into signing over their Social Security checks to the home. And I learned the depth to which some people live alone.
I met Ted there. Ted was a bachelor farmer, an only child of deceased parents. Ted was living in a mobile home when he suffered a debilitating stroke. The right side of his body was completely paralyzed.
The other nurse’s aides claimed Ted was so morbidly obese the EMTs had to enlarge the doorway of his trailer with a power saw to get him out. Ted never walked or talked after his stroke four years earlier. He communicated by pointing and grunting.
“Ted was morbidly obese?” I asked.
“Before we put him on a diet,” my co-workers said proudly. “He was 550 when they brought him in.”
I looked down the hall at Ted slumped in his tall back chair behind a tray. He couldn’t have weighed more than 175. That would explain the huge folds of loose skin that hung from his body in the shower.
“I guess that’s why he’s so hungry,” I said.
Ted was beyond hungry. He was ravenous. We watched him closely around the snack cart. When you did you would see Ted inching towards the cart, pushing slowly with his one functioning foot.
Ted betrayed himself by looking up and smiling. Ted rarely smiled. If Ted got his left hand within range of the cart, he attacked it. Within seconds his left hand was furiously stuffing food into his gaping mouth.
It wasn’t only food. Ted ate toilet paper, tissues – anything. Ted was in constant danger of choking. Ravenous gluttony took over Ted’s life.
At Christmas visitors to the nursing home increased. But no one visited Ted. Mail increased also. All the other residents got Christmas cards.
I delivered mail to my guys. Every day Ted watched me from behind his tray. The skin on his face sagged and made his eyes look bigger. He looked up hopefully.
“No mail today, Ted. Maybe tomorrow.”
On the last mail day before Christmas there were lots of cards to pass out. When I came to Ted’s room he was slumped sideways in his chair, his eyes glued to me like I was a pan of brownies.
“Ted, you got a card.”
His eyes grew big. I straightened him up in his chair and laid the card on his tray. He fumbled at the envelope, so I opened it. It was a card from the nursing home administrator. Every resident got the same cheap card. Her signature was stamped inside. Before the card’s message, she wrote “Ted.”
“Look Ted, she wrote your name.”
Ted looked up at me and his eyes filled with tears. He sobbed openly because he got a Christmas card from someone who rarely left her office and didn’t know Ted from a bale of hay. That was the moment I knew I had to get out of that job. It was just too sad.
To be continued …
- Dave McClure lives in Ottawa. He is a long-retired director of a local private agency. He is also a blogger. You can read more of Dave at Daveintheshack.blogger.com