Stories…
I work in a skilled nursing facility here in Florida. It’s a place where patients from the hospital stay, mainly to undergo rehabilitation and make sure they are strong enough to go home. I encounter different people in my job everyday, and some of these people that you encounter just leaves quite an impression on you. They are usually from the geriatric population, with their decades of experiences, life lessons and tidbits of wisdom. I consider my job a blessing, that I get to meet these people, and have a hand in their recuperation.
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Have you ever seen the movie 50 first dates? If you haven’t, the story is about a girl whose memory is stuck in the last 24 hours before she sustains a vehicular accident. Everyday is the same for her, never going forward.
This is almost the same case with a patient of mine, who I’ll call Ms. Daisy. Everyday, whenever I bring her down to the therapy room, she will always greet me with “Hi Sweetie, I didn’t see you yesterday. How are you?” when I have been seeing her almost daily for the past 2 weeks. Oftentimes, in the middle of our exercises, she will stop, with tears in her eyes. I give her a kleenex and then she will say, “I’m so sorry if I seem down in the dumps today, I miss my husband, he hasn’t been here to see me since I got here.” I reassure her, and gently say “No, that’s not true, he is always here at around 2:00. I saw him yesterday with you.” And then she replies, “Oh, ok. I guess it’s my darn bad memory again.”
And come 2:00, her husband will come, showing her a phone video of the day before, proving he was there. One time, I was still doing therapy with her, and her husband came, showed her the video. Ms. Daisy apologized for “being a nuthead”, and for not remembering.
And her husband replied with this, which I thought was so touching: “Don’t worry honey, I don’t care how much you forget. I will remember for you. As long as you don’t forget I love you, that’s all that matters.”
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