Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (92 page)

Work is an essential part of being alive. Your work is your identity. It tells you who you are. It’s gotten so abstract. People don’t work for the sake of working. They’re working for a car, a new house, or a vacation. It’s not the work itself that’s important to them. There’s such a joy in doing work well.

 

 

I make bread. (Laughs.)

 

POSTSCRIPT:
A drunk, who had obviously had a hard day’s night, enters. There is a soft discussion. She hands him a loaf. He leaves. “He asked me for a quarter. I gave him one this morning. Now he said he’s still hungry. So I offered him bread. He said, ‘If you don’t give the quarter, I’m not gonna take the bread.’ So I said, ‘Okay, don’t.’ He took the bread.”

 

 

Makin’ beds and bed pans and rotten stuff like that.

 

 

Nurse’s aide, dumb aide.

 

 

I really don’t know if I mind the work as much as you always have to work with people, and that drives me nuts. I don’t mind emptying the bed pan, what’s in it, blood, none of that bothers me at all. Dealing with people is what I don’t like. It just makes everything else blah.

 

 

As least as possible. Two days on a weekend, just to get me through school, like money for books and stuff. We start to work at seven, but I get up as late as possible, get everything on and run out the door. I ride my bike to work. I usually have someone punch me in, ’cause I’m never on time. You’re gonna think I’m nuts, but I do my work well. If I come a quarter after seven, they’re surprised. They don’t mind, because I get my work done before the allotted time. I won’t have anybody saying I did something lousy. I don’t know why.

We get on the floor and you have to take thermometers and temperatures or you have to weigh people or pass water, and you go in the rooms, and they yell when you get ‘em up so early in the morning. Then they don’t want to get out of bed when you weigh ’em. They complain, “How come the water wasn’t passed earlier?” “We couldn’t sleep all night with the noise.” Or else you’ll walk in the room and you’ll say, “Hello,” and they’ll say, “Good morning, how are you?” So I’ll say “Fine,” and some of ‘em will say, “Well, gee, you’re the one that’s s’posed to be asking me that.” They don’t even give you a chance.

I really wonder why I do have such a rotten attitude towards people. I could care less about ‘em. I’ll do my work, like, you know, good, I’ll give’em the best care, but I couldn’t care less about ’em. As far as meeting their emotional needs, forget it. That’s why (a little laugh) I don’t think I should go into nursing.

I work on a floor that’s geriatric. Old people and psychiatric, so there’s never anyone in their right minds. They’re out of it or they’re confused. After you pass out trays, and there’s rarely a tray that has everything on it, they start hollering, “I didn’t get two sugars,” and then you spend half the time running to all the rooms gettin’ all their stuff. Then you have to feed all of them, and half the patients are out of it and they spit stuff at you and they throw their food. They throw their dishes on the wall and floor. And I hate feeding patients that are always coughing. They cough right at ya. (Laughs.) That I don’t mind, cleaning stuff up. It’s just that you’re s’posed to calm ‘em down and talk to ’em, forget it. I won’t be bothered.

I used to work in a hospital, it was more of a cancer ward. Young women, men. I got along great with the men, they could care less. But I always hated working with the women. They drive you nuts. I really can’t sympathize with ‘em unless sometimes, rarely, I think, What if I was in their place? Like the younger girls, they want you to feel sorry for them. I just can’t feel that. Some of ’em are okay, but they’re always crying. That doesn’t depress me. I have no feelings at all. A lot of nurses come in and they sit with the patients and they talk with ’em. Forget it.

A patient will be in pain and they’ll be crying. They put the nurse’s light on and want to talk and stuff. I really don’t care. It’s rotten, you know? Lots of times I try to think as to why I have this attitude. I really think it was from my background in boarding school.

 

“I used to have to be forced to get out of bed in the morning and go there. I’d rarely work a weekend when I was supposed to.
(
Laughs
.)
Which isn’t me. That’s why I said I gotta get outa here, because it was getting to me, and that’s goofy. They never had any sheets. They never had anything the patient needs. Like they were paying so much money for a room. I’m not lying, don’t think I’m nuts. There wasn’t a morning when we had linen before ten, eleven ’. The patients, they’re awakened at seven. We never had adequate help and the other aides, they didn’t really fulfill the patient’s needs. I was about the only white aide in the hospital and they were wondering what I was doing there.”

 

I have a hard time dealing with black patients, because they’re really sensitive. You’re gonna think I’m rotten, but when I go into a room I don’t have a great attitude. I’m not blah, but if I don’t feel like talking, I don’t talk. I’ll give ’em a bath, but I’m not making up a bunch of conversation just to make them feel good.

It happened just last week. I was in a room with a black patient and she had her hair set in rollers, and she looked like about twenty something. I couldn’t see her hair, whether it was graying. She happened to be forty-one. I asked her what she was in for and she said arthritis. I said, “God, you look like about twenty-something.” She felt great. She said, “Gee, thanks.” I said, “I really can’t tell a black’s age, they always seem so much younger.” If you call ‘em colored they have a fit. If you call ’em black, they’ll have a fit. So you don’t call ‘em. So she got so upset. “Why are blacks so different? You mean you can’t tell a white person’s age?” They just don’t show it, not as much, in my opinion. Oh, she started yellin’. I was patient with her.

I think blacks demand more attention—like little piddley stuff she could reach for, she wanted me to get her. I mean, they’re going to take advantage of being waited on like whites. Because she’s black, she’ll get white service, too.

 

I’m not prejudiced really, but they all put their money under their pillows, while the whites put it in a drawer. I was making her bed, so I turned her on the side and I put her purse on the window. I walked out of her room and I heard her saying, “That white bitch stole my purse!” She was really yelling. I looked on the window and it was right in front of her. And then she said, “Well, stay here, you probably stole something out of it anyway.” I was going to walk out of the room and she said, “Hey, white girl, can you come back and fix the blankets up a little neater?” They were really perfect. By that time, you felt like kickin’ her right in the mouth. Rarely do I put up with it. I just say, “Do you want your bed made? Get somebody else.”

Like I was going to give a black person a bath and I was too lazy to walk and get some soap way down in the utility room, so I got the soap that was in the bathroom. So she said to me, “What do you think I am, a dog? That I’m going to use that soap that white hands have washed their hands on.” So I told her it was a fairly new bar and I said, “What does color got to do with the bar of soap?” She went on and on, so I told her I wasn’t going to give her a bath, because sometimes you can’t do anything right for ’em.

White patients are just as bad. But the blacks always bring up their color. The whites are just a pain in the neck too. Blacks are more offensive, but whites nag you more about the stuff they don’t get.

When I first started at Holy Family, I really couldn’t stand it, ’cause I really didn’t want the job. I was just doing it to get out of Maryville for a couple of hours. When I got on the floor,I didn’t know beans. I was dumb. You may think I’m nuts, but I really feel myself capable in whatever I do. So I learned what was up fast, and went out of my way to do extra stuff, to take care of blood pressures and bandages and stuff, so I’d be left alone so I could do my work. I wouldn’t have anybody on my back checking me. If they wanted something done, they could get it done, you know? I was real good friends with the nurses and aides, I liked it.

You always get a nurse, you wonder what she’s doing there. They’re blah, bad news, crabby, they try to push you around—which is how I’m afraid I’m going to turn out. Most nurses, they sit at the desk. They chart and take care of the medications. As far as patient contact, they don’t get any at all. It’s the aides, you know? The nurses don’t do anything except give a shot. The head nurse is at the desk constantly, with the doctor’s orders, so the aides get all the contact. That’s why I figure if I’m going into nursing, I won’t have any contact with the patients anyway.

I’d go nuts. I’m just doing it because it’s a good job and if times ever become like the Depression, they always need nurses. I’d still like to get a master’s, go into law school or something. Everybody thinks I’m nuts: “What are you going to nursing school for if you hate it?” Because I can do my work well and I can put up with it, even if it drives me nuts.

You either get patients who don’t want a bath at all and then report you for not giving them a bath, or patients who fake near bath time that they have chest pains so you’ll give them a bath, and the next minute you see them walking around the hall and they’re visiting.

With orthopedics, with the geriatric, it’s really discouraging. The nursing homes have given them terrible care and they have sores you wouldn’t believe—bones, tendons, everything showing. I change the dressings and soak them and try to position them where they’re not on a sore. But anywhere you put them they’re on a sore. You feel like they’re aching.

Lots of times they get bladder infections. You’ll just make a bed and they’ll urinate right on the clean side. You’ll have to, okay, man, start again. You turn them over on the clean side and then they’ll have a BM. Sometimes this goes on four or five times. You have to make a patient’s bed at least three or four times a day to do good work. It takes about four hours to get all the patients really clean. By the time you’re done, you feel so good. But a nurse comes up and says, “So-and-so needs their bed changed, they crapped all over.” It really gets discouraging. Each time you go in that room you want to kill them.

I get done at three-thirty. But lots of times it’s three-thirty and someone falls out of bed or pulls out their IVs or you know . . . Well, I’ll stay. But a lot of kids cut out at even a quarter to three. I usually punch them out,’cause they’re good about it in the morning.

 

 

 

I could care less. If the nurse gets there right away or next year, I don’t care. That’s a rotten attitude, it really is. God, I’d go nuts if I was in the hospital and someone treated me that way. What gets me so mad is: if I’m ever in the hospital, I’d be a typical patient. I’ll probably be worse than all of them. And yet I can’t stand them.

But I don’t know, you get to like some of them. There was this old man, he died recently. He came in terrible from nursing homes and we got him really good care. He was bad news. Like he’d never eat because he thought he’d have to pay for it and he didn’t have the money. He was just stubborn. He’d do everything to get you. But you knew he was confused and senile. He went back to the nursing home and I saw him and he was all shriveled up, and you wouldn’t believe the sores on his body. I was so mad. I was going to write a note to the nursing home and really do something about it.