Cameron Kay
August 23, 2016 11am-2pm
Webster House
John Q. Dela Cruz
Today I think I conquered my fear of
the third floor. At Webster there are four floors. The first floor is reception
and employee headquarters, the second is short-term care (rehab and such), the
third is the memory care unit, and the fourth is general long-term care. I’ve
spent the past three visits on the third floor and I think I’m finally
comfortable with it.
The first few times I came to
Webster, I avoided the third floor like the plague. I’d drop my bag in the
volunteer office and immediately head up to the fourth floor to assist John in
whatever activities he had planned, but a few visits ago, John didn’t need help
and handed me over to Cynthia, one of the nurses on the third floor. She gave
me a pile that contained three books: one of dramatic love poetry, one about
God, and the other a self-help book about finding tranquility. We gathered a
group of residents and I began to read selections from each, but we immediately
ran into a problem: I was the only sound English speaker.
When someone who speaks English as a
second language experiences memory loss, what can happen is that they revert
back to their mother tongue. The woman to my left was trying to speak to me in
Hindi, while the woman to my right, who I later found out only spoke Chinese,
had fallen asleep in the first ten minutes. Two of the other women spoke
Spanish, making me bitterly regret my six years of Latin. I don’t mean to be
flippant; I can’t imagine what it is like for these people not to be able to
communicate with their caregivers or volunteers like me. One woman grabbed on
to me with wild and started speaking no language at all, making nonsensical
sounds, but clinging onto my arm and looking at me as if she was trying to tell
me the most important thing in the world. I found out from one of the nurses
that she had suffered a stroke and lost her ability to speak coherently.
I did a puzzle with another resident
(I can’t name residents because that violates their privacy). She always wore a
helmet and was one of the few who could speak. As we started to put together
the puzzle, she began to tell me about her accident, the reason she ended up in
Webster. She told me that she went to lunch with a friend in Town & Country
Village in Palo Alto and her friend basically tried to run her over with her
car. She got upset and started shouting that it was murder, but calmed down
after I turned her attention back to the puzzle. I don’t know if what she told
me is the truth, in fact I suspect it’s distorted, but what alarmed me was how
true it was to her.
The issue with losing one’s mental
faculties is that what you believe to be the absolute truth can be something entirely
wrong. I took this lovely Polish woman on many walks. She was a court room
translator for many years and often likes to tell me what it’s like to speak
many languages. She seems sharp as a tack, but then at the end of every visit
she asks me to take her home to an address on Sheridan Avenue. She tells me
that she doesn’t live at Webster and asks me to take her home, but I can’t. I
have to take her back upstairs.
The third floor breaks my heart.
People who were once professors, linguists, accountants, or any other
profession you can think of can’t tell you what year it is. However, it’s
opened my eyes to the gravity of diseases like Alzheimer’s and dementia. They’re
hard on the patient, but they must be just as hard on their loved ones, and I’d
love to be able to help both.
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