On the last Friday of August a few months ago, I, suddenly, felt dizzy and, abruptly, dropped to the floor. At the time, I assumed that the heat, which felt unbearable in August in a house built in the 1860’s and that had only one old conditioner had finally gotten to me.
So then, I managed to drag myself while sitting on my bottom on the porch floor and, afterwards, into the house and over to the stairs that go to the second story of the home. Next while still sitting, I bumped myself on my bottom up three steps and, with my feet on the floor below, I stood to my feet so as to walk from the staircase to the living room where I sat on the sofa.
I decided to rest there and recover from having fallen onto a hard floor during a heatwave in central Massachusetts where I live. So several days later, I discovered that instead of feeling better, I couldn’t move my right foot at all! So I called the emergency crew that responds to ambulance calls in my town and had a duo of paramedics come pick me up to take me to the local hospital so that I could find out about what was wrong with my foot.
(It wound up that its bones were broken just under the two shortest toes and I watched as a plaster of Paris cast going up as far as my knee was built around it.) Next, I was, subsequently, carted a week later to a lovely nursing home for rehabilitation from what turned out to be a fabulous uplifting bunch of occupational and physical therapists.
Why are they so good? They are comprised of four women who tailor make a treatment plan for each individual patient based on the age and other markers pertaining to that person, including whether they had recently had surgery, a stroke, broken bones or other conditions that had brought them to the nursing facility.
They, in turn, coordinated their care with the medical doctors and nurses in charge of the patients’ overall care. Thus, all the ministrations applied to get each resident stabilized and improved as much as possible was carried out.
So I wrote about the care this following description:
Overall, I give the facility four out of five stars. Here are the reasons.
First off, the medical care from the on-hand doctors, social worker Michael and nurses is excellent, especially Sarah S. and Jessica who were often the first shift nurses on the third floor rehabilitation wing. (Most of them are willing to do anything to help you out — even when it is not part of their job specifications.)
The occupational and physical therapy department was exceptional while the individual rehabilitative care-plan for each patient was innovative, appealing, exciting, just hard enough to successfully carry out each day and was well thought out by an enthusiastic set of teachers.
The place was always spotlessly clean, and the daily activities offered to patients were largely fun and engaging.
Sometimes staff was short on some wing and the scheduler had to scramble to find someone with a suitable background and credentials to fill in for the missing personnel. Moreover, occasionally one has to wait a long time (more than a half hour) to get a request fulfilled as the certified nurse assistants are sometimes too busy to come and help you in a more timely fashion.
Some of the meal offerings are excellent and delicious. Others involve highly processed food of the kinds highly implicated in diseases like diabetes, diverticulitis and more. So generally, it is good and sometimes not so.
I was impressed that a 101 year old woman in the assisted living wing residing in the nursing home was kept a close eye on such that she was brought upstairs to the rehabilitation wing for a few weeks to help her improve in walking, etc., for a spell.
In summation, it is easy to note that the majority of the workers in this nursing home are very dedicated, friendly, professional and warm-hearted while striving to be as excellent as possible in their daily tasks. So in a final evaluation, I can heartily recommend this place after being there for two months while recovering from a fracture and stabilizing my blood pressure.
So while I was fretting over various negatives such as the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, as well as the fate of our newest immigrants in MA (of which many were home health nurse aids, doctors and nurses, housekeepers, kitchen staff from different countries in Africa, the Caribbean, Egypt, Central and South America in addition to other lands), I felt absolutely personally safe and uplifted by my experiences of the nursing home assorted kinds of workers, who (as several of them explained in broken English) — they wanted to do their jobs well since it is a kind of “calling” to help others recover from ailments and thrive.
… Trust me: that outlook comes in handily when one is allowed only to bear weight on one leg so as to constantly stand like a stork and do no walking for around a month in order to not make the broken bones worse.
So with this kind of happening locally with assorted people all coming together to improve the quality of life for other locals, it is reassuring to recognize that we here in Massachusetts are ensconced in a sort of magical realm and not impacted much by happenings in Washington, D. C. whether it involves giving weapons of mass destruction to other countries so that they can deliberately slaughter both soldiers and civilians from another land than one’s own.
Furthermore, it is reassuring to realize that kindly, helpful people are everywhere surrounding us in the world. It helps mitigate the mental and emotional impacts of so much that is destructive and wrong in the world.
In that sense, it becomes less alarming that certain politicians are or aren’t elected to office as their actions don’t much impact one’s personal life, which seem sort of charmed on account of so many good hearted individuals existing everywhere across the globe and coming here to help out by having jobs in U.S. industries wherein we have shortages like in our hospitals and nursing homes.
Sally Dugman lives in MA, USA and came home a week ago after spending two months in a nursing home where the care in every department from laundry and nursing ministration to kitchen support and rehabilitation shows the good that can be accomplished when people originating from other lands get together to promote the common good via uplifting jobs so as to take care of others. That surely beats out bombing others to smithereens such as some people high up in governments aim to do to one’s perceived as unwelcome foreigners.
