On the fourth Tuesday in a row that a woman at the front desk of Thornfield Glen told me my husband was resting and could not be disturbed, I said thank you, and I drove home, and I did not come back the following Tuesday. My name is Beatrice Okonkwo-Lund. I am seventy-two years old. Instead of coming back I sat at my own computer and found the careers page on that facility\u2019s website, and there was one opening, part-time dietary aide, evenings and weekends, no experience required, ten dollars and forty cents an hour. I filled the application in with my own name because my name is not unusual in this county and because the people who answer the telephone at the front desk are not the people who hire dishwashers. Two weeks later a young woman named Marisol called me and asked whether I could start on the Saturday, and I said yes, and on the Saturday I put on a navy polo shirt with their logo on it and walked past the front desk I had been turned away from six times, and nobody looked up, because nobody looks up at the woman pushing the dish cart.<\/p>\n
Arvid went in on the eleventh of January after the second stroke, and I want to say clearly that I did not put him there lightly or quickly. I kept him at home for nineteen months and I am not able to lift a grown man off a bathroom floor at seventy-two, and the third time it happened I was on that floor with him for forty minutes before the ambulance came, and that is the honest reason. Thornfield Glen is a hundred and nine beds and it looked like the best of the four I toured. Visiting hours are eleven to seven. For the first three months I came every day and sat with him from two until four and he knew me about half the time, which the neurologist told me to expect. Then in May a thing started happening that I could not get a straight answer about. Twice in May and then four Tuesdays running in June, I arrived in the afternoon and was told he was resting after a difficult morning and that the nurse manager preferred he not be disturbed. I asked which nurse manager. I was told she was off the floor. I asked to speak to the director of nursing and I left two messages and neither was returned. I asked, finally, whether I could just look in on him without waking him, and the woman at the desk said she was not able to authorise that, and said it kindly, the way you say it when you have been told to say it.<\/p>\n
I worked in that kitchen for five weeks. Saturdays and Sundays four until eight, Wednesdays five until nine. I scraped trays and ran the dish machine and I was, I am told, quite good at it. And here is the thing about the dietary aide: you go onto every hall. You go into every room on the east wing with the cart, twice a day, and nobody stops you, and nobody asks who you are, because you are the trays. On my second shift I pushed the cart into room 214 and my husband was sitting in a wheelchair facing the window with his dinner on the overbed table six inches too far away for him to reach it, and when I came back forty minutes later to collect it, it had not been touched, and a girl of about nineteen recorded it on the sheet as refused. I did not say anything to him. I want to explain that, because it sounds monstrous. If I had spoken to him he would have said my name, and if he had said my name on a Saturday evening when I was not supposed to be in that building I would have been escorted out in ten minutes and never allowed back in any capacity. So I put my hand flat on his shoulder for about three seconds, which is a thing dietary aides do, and I took the tray, and I went out into the corridor and stood in the linen alcove for a minute and a half. Then I went and got my notebook out of my handbag in the staff room, and I wrote down the date, the time, the room number, and the words meal placed out of reach, recorded as refused.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On the fourth Tuesday in a row that a woman at the front desk of Thornfield Glen told me my husband was resting and could not be… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11691,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11690","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bbdc.it.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bbdc.it.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bbdc.it.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bbdc.it.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bbdc.it.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11690"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bbdc.it.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11690\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11692,"href":"https:\/\/bbdc.it.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11690\/revisions\/11692"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bbdc.it.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bbdc.it.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bbdc.it.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bbdc.it.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}