Hi everyone – I can now give you some recent news of my visits. I was back on the ward for elderly and dementia on Monday last and it did me good to see some really lovely people. One of the first ladies I saw was a well-spoken lady with well-kept short grey hair. She was sitting up in bed doing Sudoku number puzzles. I was never any good at figures or mathematics so never was interested in attempting them. The Quick Crossword in the Metro daily newspaper is more my cup of tea and I still peek at Google to get an answer when I need help!
Anyway, the lady was really keen on the maths puzzles and said to me “every little bit helps to keep the brain ticking over.” I nodded in agreement, saying to her that the filling in the blank squares, must be like filling in the blanks in the hospital day. She laughed. I spoke to her about filling in the blanks in my day by playing the piano.
Another lady I spoke to asked for some reading books, citing romance and suspense as her favourites. She liked to guess the outcomes but never wanted to know the endings…I guess that's like life itself isn’t it. We don’t really like to know how things will end, so long as there’s a story line leading up to it. Its not as if we are waiting on a station platform for the last train is it!
Sometimes we come across an elderly patient with a really terrific memory of the past and with a tongue to recount all their adventures. This was so on Monday – an Austrian Jewish lady chock full of memories who had us entranced by stories. She spoke of her being in hospital saying, “It becomes quite interesting when you’re ill”. It’s certainly another perspective from a hospital bed.
I opened another lady’s packet of cream crackers. She must have been in her eighties but was dressed and painted as if she was in her thirties. I think she was a little abstracted from current life but one could see she took care of her hair and her looks.
On Mondays the soup round is usually carrot soup. I was with one lady sipping away at her mug but she described the soup as “indeterminate.”
One Croatian lady replied she was “so-so” when I asked how she was. She said her English was very poor so I began to expand on the English use of “so so”. Most patients say “not bad” or “50 50” or “half an half” like I’m tempted to say which half is ok and which is not? Why is it that we say “not bad” when we are feeling bloody awful. Is it a British thing? The Croatian lady showed me a huge scar on her right knee.
I played Nat King Cole singing "Let There Be Love" to a lady patient and her devoted husband sitting by the side of the bed holding his wife’s hand whilst she was breathing through an oxygen mask. She seemed more at ease listening to the music and the lady in the next bed was whispering the lyrics on her lips. A few weeks ago I had played the same song to a lady who was constantly demanding attention even telling a nurse that the water in her jug was at the wrong temperature. (One of the nurses offered to go back to the kitchen to try and help.) But the patient was fascinated by my acting out the lyrics of Let There Be Love and was especially taken by the rhyming couplets. Usually, I act out the lyrics like in a game of charades: when it comes to “a lark and a dove,” I imitate a bird twittering and I flutter my arms as if I’m taking off. When it comes to “champagne” then I pretend to drink straight from the bottle, and "oysters under the sea" becomes “oysters under the bed”. That particular lady asked me to write down some of the lyrics, so taken she was by the turns of phrase. I did write down two or three couplets, but she had trouble reading what I’d written and became frustrated. I explained that a lark and a dove were birds, but she asked, “what is a bird” and on a couplet that began, “Let there be you, let there be me. Let there be oysters under the sea” she asked me “who is me and who is you”. At this point I wish I had been an oyster under the sea, so crazy was the conversation going!
Anyway, back to Monday, we met a lovely gentleman with a bushy grey beard and a voice like a BBC commentator from the fifties. He had worked for Sir Shridath Ramphal who was a Guyanese politician who was the second Commonwealth Secretary-General serving from 1975 to 1990. We could have pulled up chairs to listen to this jovial man re-tell his tales and adventures. He told us he had been introduced to Nelson Mandela commentating how privileged he was to meet him, and Nelson Mandela replying “and how privileged I am to meet you sir.” Hopefully we might see him next Monday.
