Documenting my journey through the mental health system

Folding towels. That’s all he does.

Some things are worse than death. L:ike growing old. Or dementia.

I’ve worked with a lot of old people in my time as a CNA. Thousands, by now. And even without dementia, growing old is no picnic. It is pain, slowness, weakness, and all kinds of medical issues. But sometimes the ultimate curse awaits us as we sit on top of our life – what we once were is washed away. Our living bodies are just shells holding a barely beating heart. We become husks, living ghosts, strangers to ourselves and everyone always a stranger. We lose our friends and family even though they may be alive and well. We lose our dignity. We lose all hope, because there’s no going back.

Over the years I’ve grown to absolutely hate it. I hate dementia, and I fear it. I don’t even like working with dementia. This is why I stick to hospitals. I could never work a nursing home or memory care unit.

But in hospice, there is plenty of dementia. This would be fine if they weren’t mobile, but sometimes they are. And we’re not a locked unit at the VA, so I’m somehow expected to keep a hall of patients safe while looking after a dementia patient or two bouncing off the walls. Because they certainly don’t sleep at night, they go wandering.

Luckily that is not the case right now, I don’t have any aggressive and mobile dementia patients. I have folding towels guy.

He is perfectly pleasant and maybe even content. We keep him warm and he sleeps through the night with mild doses of trazodone and temazepam. He giggles, he is hard of hearing, and he has the memory of a goldfish. In the evening he sundowns, and we distract him with folding towels.

A huge pile of washcloths, and we ask him if he’d like to fold them up, and he always does. It distracts him for awhile. Buys another moment. And I looked at him tonight and thought oh my god, this existence is horrific.

Sometimes it keeps me up at night. That his existence is reduced to folding towels.

Maybe I am too cynical. He has family that visit him. He is by far the most easy dementia patient I’ve ever had. He laughs a lot and thinks a lot of things are funny in ways we can’t understand. He can still get to the toilet in time and can stand and pivot from chair to bed.

But I am so disturbed by dementia and the aging process in general. I fear it more than death itself.