How embarrassing. Blogger has been sold and upgraded since I last posted two years ago. But I see I have not missed much, as I have had not much to say. I do have a new job or two. Now I work at what is called a continuing care retirement center. The idea looks good on paper: You pay money up front to join then when you have become too much of a burden to your family, or you want to retire as you have become weary of taking care of a house, you retire to this community. Then as your health begins to get worse (hopefully slowly) your level of care will change but where you live will not. The care begins at an independent level and the facility offers care all the way up to skilled nursing care. But here is the rub--we have not really considered the cases of Alzheimer's disease. It does seem to be on an increase all over the world, but at this facility, built in the later sixties, Alzheimer's was not part of the architectural plan, and significant architectural detail is needed to deal with dementia patients. At the time of the facility's construction, people did not really live long enough to develop dementia (or Alzheimer's, dementia is easier to spell and more widely, or at least intuitively widely understood), so when patients get to that point in the disease, lots of other things have usually happened, including marital difficulties. And how do we deal with divorce? The answer is not well. But that is for another time. The night shift is the shift I work, and it always has the same problem--people are under the assumption that people sleep all night. Dementia patients often suffer from sleep disturbences, causing them to be awake at odd hours. The wee small hours of the night. And since everyone sleeps at night, you obviously do not need more than two nurse's aides at night, and since dementia patients often like to walk, most dementia facilities have some circular shape to them that allow dementia patients to wander until they get tired enough to go to sleep. But our halls are mostly straight lines that do not allow for continuous wandering, and causes us to need to constantly monitor these patients that always sleep through the night.
