Laughter, bravery, and impossible choices: Life in ‘god’s waiting room’

Shit.

The smell is the first thing you remember. You just can’t help it.

Faeces and disinfectant. Once fighting hard against the other.

The smell of shit is winning comprehensively. I think I could have smashed a pane of glass out of the window, washed it, and took it home washed it again and it would still reek of shit.

Aged care, home care, disability care is a good job if you’re going to university. It’s flexible, they always need people, the pay isn’t terrible.

The work isn’t even that bad. There is a lot of poo. That might bother some people. It didn’t bother me.

It’s not the shit that’s the problem. It’s the choices. Like one of those ethical puzzles you try to have fun with.

“You have a mother of two tied to a train line and there is a speeding train rushing towards them. You can switch the train to another track but it means that a one-armed, former paralympian, white collar criminal will instead be crushed. What do you choose?”

I used to like those games a lot.

The main building sits at the top of a gorgeous hill I struggle with on my bike — but the building is too flat and low to take any sort of advantage of it.

I walk through the front door, bag in hand — — not even behind the desk before Katie is yelling out at me with real acid in her voice.

“Great! Someone who didn’t call in sick,” she says.

This is bad news. It means that other people HAVE called in sick and in the aged care industry in Australia you don’t have staff to burn. We are always short and someone calling in sick at best means everyone else has to pick up the slack.

“Fuck,” I say. “How many people are coming in?”

“So far it’s just you and me,” Katie says. “But we will be fine. We can do the whole place by ourselves. We don’t need any help — — RIGHT.”

Katie is a nurse and will be in charge of the wing today. I’m an assistant in nursing so I just shake my head. I don’t want to encourage her negativity.

I look at the clock.

“It’s almost six,” I say. “I’ll just get started. If we are going to be short, I’ll need to get into it as quickly as I can.”

“Good idea. Start with C wing and go from there.”

I stow my helmet and jacket, grab some latex gloves and a white jacket and off I go to see Frank.

Knock on his door, stick my head inside.

“Morning Frank,” I say. “How are you?”

Frank says nothing. Just pulls the covers a little higher to his chin.

“Are you ready to get up?”

“No.”

“Lots of people sick today,” I say. “I was hoping to get you dressed first so we could take a bit of time.”

“Leave me in bed a little longer,” he says. Pulls the covers up until just his eyes are peeking out. Frank, some 80 years old.

“I can Frank but I know that you’ll be happier if we don’t have to rush.”

Frank is still a big man after all these years, surprisingly solid to the touch. Bald apart from a tiny ring of hair just above his ears. Mentally he’s there most of the time. He stares at the ceiling for a while with eyes that saw the second world war, that lived through it.

He looks at me and bargains that he can’t get a few extra minutes in bed out of this KID so he might as well give it up.

“Yeah alright,” he says.

We all call this place “The Lodge”. It isn’t bad as nursing homes go.

One day, when we are all at lunch, someone calls it “God’s waiting room”. Some people laugh, other people don’t.

I don’t and I pay attention to those like me, I see some of them pay attention back.

Over the months I talk more to these people in the quiet corridors. A small dark nurse from the Philippines starts making me cups of coffee whenever she gets one for herself. We never say anything about anything.

No matter what you call it there are real moments of joy here. Moments when people show who they are.

Little Johnny — for example — had a cackle that you could hear through every layer of concrete that fucking place had to throw at him. He laughs all the time.

One day I notice he is crying. Scrunched up in a padded seat in the garden, tears dripping down his face.

“Look at them,” he says to me and points to the sky. “They’re fighting for their lives up there.”

I look up but there is nothing but clear blue scratched with white. He’s seeing angels and demons or fighter planes in some war.

I don’t know.

I must have looked sad because he reaches out with his spidery old hand and pats me on the arm. His hand is unique — not unique like all of your hands are now but like they will be — touched back by every single thing you touch over and over for your whole life until — — it’s different, lined, twisted, and entirely earned.

Johnny pumps his voice up until it’s full.

“Don’t worry. We’ve got them on the run lad,” he says then he winks at me. “We’re winning and we’re going to win.”

Comforting me.

Finished with Frank now and I walk the long hall back to the front desk hearing the soft noises and slow mutterings as the wings begin to wake up.

“How many now,” I ask Katie.

“Tammy is here, Jeff is here,” she says.

“That’s not it.”

“That’s it for now.”

“Fuck.”

Four people. One hundred beds.

Twenty five people each to shower, dress, and feed.

EACH.

Minus one — Frank.

I look at the clock. It’s 6.30.

Fuck.

Warrick next.

“Hey Warrick,” I say. “How did you sleep.”

“Slowly,” he says.

This is something he said to me once that made me laugh so hard and for so long that he says it to me now every time he sees me.

He says it earnestly and I always laugh. Sometimes when the dementia is bad he will respond “slowly” to questions that make no sense and look at me hopefully.

At those times I fake it and we laugh together. Most of the time I end up in a place where I’m not faking.

So I say hello to Warrick. He tells me he slept slowly and we laugh.

Then he nods, he is ready, away we go.

The morning routine: bed to mechanical lifter, mechanical lifter to chair, chair to shower. Wash and talk.

I take off his pad — — we don’t say nappy — — wash the faeces from his backside, his testicles. Some days I need to push back his foreskin to clean it from there as well.

I like this.

It becomes normal and is comforting and dignified in its normality.

Back to the room. Warrick is dried now and clothed. I use the mechanical lifter again, put on a new pad — not nappy — and pull his pants up.

So here it is, the ethical puzzle. Less fun than choosing who to splatter with your switched rail car.

A wailing from another room begins and a buzzer sounds.

“I’m dirty, I’m dirty. Nurse. Nurse.” (the residents call all of us nurses )

More noise now. Much the same way as it does at a bar or in a prison, the home ebbs and flows. Noise begets noise, silence silence.

“Nurse, nurse, NURSE I’M HUNGRY.”

Warrick hears the noises, adds a request of his own.

“I don’t like these pants, I want the brown ones.”

He dangles in his harness, looks at me with eyes that are consenting and pleading.

There will probably be a point in your life when you too learn to balance these things, in this way.

When you will be truly helpless.

So it’s not as fun as that rail car game but let’s play anyway. Who do you help, who do you ignore.

The interesting thing about this choice is that each one is uncontroversially, inarguably, INEXCUSABLY wrong.

Did you leave someone screaming they were dirty and laying in their own shit.

Yes I did.

Did you leave someone who wanted to be fed — screaming and hungry.

I did.

Did you force someone to wear something they didn’t want to. Did you ignore someone in possible pain.

I did. I did. I did.

On that day I did one of these things. All of these things, none of them.

None of these decisions can be defended, especially in today’s world. There’s never been less sympathy for the devil than nowadays and less empathy for sinners.

I’m not going to tell you my choice.

You think of yours. You think of what it means to make it.

Later I see a different choice. I quit. I blow the whistle. Nothing happens.

Still, I remember Old Frank and his stories, Johnny and his bravery.

There is another choice that I see much much later. But it’s more complicated and it takes longer, it will never help Frank because Frank must be dead by now.

Tear down the trains. The tracks. Unchain the people tied to them and smash at least this set of impossible choices to bits.

Because a business is a business and there are things that should be above that, outside that, next to it — I don’t give a fuck just separate.

There are some things that words like “minimum viable product” should not sit alongside — words like “quality of life” or “human being” for example, and when you put them together they sit uneasy and bear descendents you would never want to look in the eye.

But you might.

One last memory I have of the lodge.

Frank in his chair again. His bull neck and killer’s eyes on me as he speaks.

“Life happens faster,” he tells me. “And old age lasts — — longer — — than you ever believed it could.”