They’d been plaguing me for far too long (a few weeks now) but are slowly starting to go away…
(Yes, they’ve hampered me recently. What can I say? I am merely human.
Having a bad headache usually doesn’t result in brilliant thinking.)
I was – am still – dealing with gallbladder congestion, massive sinus congestion and esophagus issues. (It’s all related and in turn can affect circulation.) I know how to deal with this. We all have our weaknesses. My body needs to be working like a race-horse’s because if it isn’t, it really starts to buck to get my attention. That’s the non-conscious part of the brain kicking in, trying to get through to the conscious part.
Also… I just wrote the following… (see below). Then, when I was looking for an address to send a book to, I discovered that I have a niece who’s just completed a BA in psychology (though her thesis calls it a BSc, likely as per Dutch university instructions). Topic? Bullying in care homes (among residents). That’s an interesting coincidence. (I took a quick look. I suspect that I might really like you, niece, if we ever were to meet.) It’s made me smile.
I think that I should mention now that because of the housing situation and the plethora of regulations and registration requirements in the country that I am currently in, I am living in an actual nursing home – care home – in a small municipality surrounded by agricultural land, miles away from anything, far away from places where I would like to be and need to be.
I thought I’d be content (and resourceful) enough to make it work. I was completely unprepared for the lack of privacy – which I have found some solutions for – and the fact that when nothing is physically wrong with you and you are much younger than most other residents, almost everyone assumes that you either have dementia or must be learning-disabled (“except most of the residents,” I should probably add).
I’d also not at all considered the fact that people who go live in such places go live there to die there. Ambulances are frequent visitors as are undertaker vans (and removal lorries), along with the daily tides of carers. The hopelessness and emptiness is often overwhelming and the lack of respect and consideration with which you get treated is not really cheering me up either.
That’s partly my fault because I feel so out of place here. (That’s for other reasons, too, including having lived abroad for so long.)
At first, strangers who didn’t know that I was living here too even sometimes made remarks along the lines of all people who live here no longer being interested in anything whatsoever, everything passing them by. To almost everyone else, you become a thing when you live in a place like this. You’re seen as frail, by definition.
I had really underestimated how incredibly hard this would be.
(Don’t worry, not everything is bad.)
Hundreds of people – all kinds of staff and other visitors – walk in and out throughout the day and because there are also people with dementia here, you have to go through a set of sluice doors – that’s a lock – of glass doors. After hours, you need to tap in a code to be able to leave. During the day, you have to wait for the other doors to have closed but there is enough staff and a receptionist to keep on eye on wandering dementia patients.
