Loneliness

No calls for 11 hours. My new Sunday shift is turning out to be a sleeper. I manage to keep myself busy with various projects, but am growing bored by late afternoon. At 5:30 we finally get a call. Elderly housing, elderly woman not feeling well.

There are many elderly housing complexes in this town. We go to this one all the time. It is a two story complex with five wings A-E. The residents enter through a main entrance. There is a common area with an aquarium that could use some algae scrapped from its sides, a cafeteria, a pool room, an area to sit and play cards. There are always a lot of people sitting out in the common area near the front door. They always want to know who we are coming for, who we are taking out.

The apartments open into the each wing's hallway. Behind every door is the same layout: a small open kitchen, a carpeted living room, one bedroom with a bath off of it. I feel like I have been in just about every unit in the place, some several times. I've been here for codes and strokes, and falls and MIs and COPD and more often, for not feeling well.

Tonight I stand there looking down at the 80 year-old woman sitting in her kitchen chair in no obvious distress, saying she just feels lousy. She says she's had diarrhea today and an ache in her shoulder and tingling in her fingers, and some nausea. I look at her apartment. It is cluttered with bills and mailings from medicare and insurance and drug companies, lottery tickets, mail order catalogs, newspapers, prescription bottles, a glucometer, crossword puzzles, a scrapbook. I ask if the woman has called her doctor, she says no one is there on the weekends. She needs to get her glasses and her book and newspaper and a coat before we leave. It all makes me very depressed. I know there are a lot of old folks who love living here who have active social groups, but there are others who live alone behind their doors, not just in this complex, but in apartments all across the world.

I've done this call so many times, old woman just not feeling well, doesn't want stay alone in her apartment, but doesn't really want to go to the hospital, what she really wants is just to have people there in her apartment, so she stalls. We finally go and she talks the whole way in. After we leave her off, she thanks us for being kind to her, and then turns her attention to the nurse, who cuts her short. "I'll be back in a moment." And then the nurse goes into the next room and helps the doctor with a patient who needs to be intubated. The woman alone at least has her book and her glasses and a bright room with a view of the ER where people bustle about.