GeoFee
I am who I am becoming...
Barbara, my companion, had a colleague come for dinner. He, Timothy Diamond, had written a book titled “Making Grey Gold”; an insightful presentation of how corporations exploit and oppress senior citizens. We had a very informative conversation. He presents nursing homes as resembling prisons, where often indifferent persons are hired to manage frail and fragile persons.
As a pastor I often visited nursing homes in many cities and towns. Were my memory better I could tell many stories of neglect and abuse. This said, I also noticed staff were were caring and kind. They tended to be a minority.
Rita and I watched our mother dying in a small town hospital. My sister Eva, who was mum’s primary connection with our family, she lived in the same town as the hospital, visited her daily. Her observations of staff behaviour presented strong evidence of their lack of genuine care. These are documented in her journal. When I visited mum, I often saw the nursing staff sitting round a table, sipping coffee and chatting. This while patients lay alone in their rooms
Barbara is a retired Nursing Educator. She often visited critical care units in diverse hospitals. One day, while speaking with students by the nurse station, she noticed the present nurses neglecting a patient’s signal. She asked why they were not responding. They told her the patient was forever ringing the bell. When they responded they found nothing of concern.
Barbara went to see the patient. There she discovered, while conversing with the patient, that she was struggling with deep anxiety, rooted in the fear of death and concern for the well-being of her children.
The primary concern of our social economy is money. My prayer is that, one by one, we reject service for money, replacing it with service expressed as compassion. This is not to say we should not get wages for our service. Only to say that service ought be our motive and not wages.
