3rd Week of Long Term Care

Tomorrow brings the last 2 days of clinicals at long term care... which I'm pretty excited about! I love the instructors in this rotation, but just not the work. Anyways, just wanted to share a story from last week...  

I was caring for a resident who was mostly independent. She suffered a stroke about 10 years ago, and has been living with its consequences ever since. Like I said before, she is mostly dependent, which means she can do activities of daily life mostly on her own (in the long term care setting - not at a house) so I found myself spending most of my time with her just talking to her and her husband, whom she shared a room with.  Besides that I was so thrilled to see this couple still in love and caring for each other so strongly after so many years of life, it was great getting to watch their interactions. Because of her stroke, my resident was

 unable to speak well - she could say some things, and her husband seemed to understand her quite well. A favorite phrase of hers when she was not understood was "oh piss" so as you can imagine, the days were filled with quite a few laughs :)  She also liked to make humming and clicking noises when I was listening to her lungs... Oh and moaned when I gave her insulin shots!  It was funny, but not as funny to my instructor since I didn't get all my assessments done!  Haha, anyways.... 

The BEST part of this story was last Thursday, my last day with her, when it happened to be "Oktoberfest" during lunch at the facility... The tables had beer mugs on them, they served brats, and even tastes of O'Douls beer!  They also had an accordion player singing and playing sauerkraut traditional German music... Now remember how I mentioned above that my resident could not speak very well?   

WELL when I visited her at the lunch table, imagine my surprise to hear her SINGING ALONG with the music.  She knew/said a lot of the words, not to mention was clapping her hands, and had the biggest smile on her face!   Her husband even told me that she had previously

 been standing in front of her wheelchair "dancing"!  I wish I would have seen it - but still, this really touched me and hit home for me the damage a stroke can do.  In her case, the stroke had damaged the speech part of her brain (Left) and because the right side was still intact, she was able to sing almost perfectly!    

I am amazed at what the body can do and can not wait to see what else I will learn from my patients throughout the rest of this 8 months of nursing school!!