Friday, Jun. 17, 2005 @ 9:06 a.m.

BP

Nursing homes can be very bad places. The staff is usually overworked, under educated and under paid and the residents suffer for it. I've treated enough nursing home residents in enough states to know what I'm talking about. There, of course, are skilled nursing facilities that maintain higher standards but those are few and far between and usually reserved for the people that can afford them. When the residents are brought into a clinic by whoever is assigned that job for the day, they are usually pushed in on a wheelchair by a surly looking nurse or nursing aid who does nothing to hide that fact that they really would prefer to be anywhere else at the moment. The resident sits there, almost lifeless, slumped in the chair staring at you mutely with a look in their eyes that says they've given up any pretense of control over their lives or bodies. Do with me what you will.
I'll never forget a particular patient, brought in from a local nursing home. The doctor went in to see her and came out with a grim look on his face and told us that we should all go in and have a look at her, if we wanted to, she was an exemplary case of BP (bullous pemphigoid). BP is an autoimmune disorder (your body attacks itself, thinking it is a foreign substance and therefore needs to be destroyed) that causes the skin to form gigantic, watery blisters that at some point will pop, exposing raw, painful skin. If left untreated, it can be deadly, involving 80-90% of the skin's surface. You can imagine the chance of infection and all the other associated complications.
Morbid curiosity got the better of me and I went in to have a look, thinking of how I could best approach this older woman without acting as if I was ogling. The first thing that hit me when I walked through the door was the smell, a pungent mixture of rotten skin and stale urine and as I approached the gurney I realized that she wasn't conscious. She was swaddled in three or four blankets that had large discolored rings in the areas where the blisters had burst and the blood and water had been absorbed and I knew she was just stewing in her own filth. I had the strongest urge to unwrap her and clean her up, like she was a dirty little child. Trembling hands were above the blankets, twitching in time to her labored breathing and gigantic rippling blisters that seemed more like water balloons than anything the human body could create. I raised my eyes to her face and saw sweet, round, pale cheeks embracing a plump little chin and two, large sunken eyes, darting underneath thin purple eyelids.
She didn't live through the week. How did it get that bad in the first place? People passing the buck, I guess. How come her family didn't raise a fuss and have her treated before it got to that point? Out of sight, out of mind.
I'm usually *much* funnier than this.

The current mood of tagamii at www.imood.com

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Reading~ The Piano Teacher
Listening to~ Silence
Worrying about~ Paying for lunch

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******************************************************* Incontinence - Friday, Mar. 10, 2006

Winter - Friday, Nov. 04, 2005

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OCEAN - Sunday, Sept. 18, 2005

More Potty Talk & Ground Zero - Tuesday, Sept. 06, 2005