Citrus, Chocolate, Lotion, Socks, and the Nursing Home

Photo: Wikipedia

I decided to take small tangelos to the nursing home this week. Last week I took small tubes of hand lotion and small Ziploc bags of Lindt chocolate balls for the non-diabetic residents who either don’t have families or whose families are either too far away to make the trip or never come to see them, they’ve abandoned them to the care of the state of Virginia and its employees who are mostly foreign and do not understand how people can discard their loved ones into a nursing home, a dreadful but necessary place for those who need round the clock care or who truly do not have any family left. The alternative would probably be that they would join the homeless in the streets.

As a foreign born American, two residents affected me most profoundly – a German lady (I shall call her Helga) who has such severe diabetes, her right leg had been partially amputated twice. I speak German and I can communicate with her every time I go. A spark of joy lights up in her eyes when we talk in German. Helga has no other relatives in the U.S.

The second resident is an Italian lady whom I call Maria. She does not speak English much and has advanced dementia but is otherwise calm. Because she is toothless, I have a hard time understanding what she says. The nursing home did not provide her with dentures, they just puree her food. I asked her many times if she has family and what part of Italy she is from. She always responds, I am from Italy, all over, and I have no children. She cannot remember her hometown anymore or her name.

Maria resides in the Arcadia section of the nursing home, a place really far from the mythological Arcadia which was a paradise of sorts; most residents in this Arcadia are locked up since they are ambulatory and might otherwise try to walk away from the nursing home. But Maria is wheelchair bound and has more freedom. She would never remember the elevator passcode but she could sneak into the elevator with a careless visitor. They do wear ankle or wrist bracelets just in case they get lost.

One man managed to escape last week and I witnessed him trying to cross a busy highway intersection with no pedestrian crossing. Three nurses were chasing him with a wheelchair in tow, trying to bring him back.

Obviously the nursing staff is too busy and not very attentive to their patients’ whereabouts and needs, the ratio of care to the number of patients is appalling. My own mother had escaped their care but she did not make it too far, her granddaughter found her, all dressed up to go into town, waiting on a bench outside for an imaginary ride.

Why give tangelos you ask? Fragrant citrus fruits, especially oranges, bring back memories of my childhood under tyrannical socialist society, a nursing home of sorts for able-bodied people from which we could not escape if we wanted to – we were locked up within the borders of our country which served as a prison to keep us in, away from the rest of the free world that lived so much better than we did.

Once a year, usually at Christmas, the dictator would order more food in the stores and exotic fruits would be brought in, bananas and oranges. I loved the oranges wrapped in thin tissue, printed with unrecognizable words from a faraway country, Israel; the fragrant fruit was filling the house with intoxicating citrus perfume. It was such a treat, we placed a few oranges in the Christmas tree, in small paper baskets decorated with colorful crepe paper. Chocolate candy and butter cookies were dangling from colorful threads as well.

Last year I gave everybody socks – a small but such useful gift!  Socks were so hard to find in the communist stores, we had to learn to knit to make our own if we wanted our feet to be warm in wintertime.

I took hand lotion too every year – it is painful to have dry and cracked hands. I know all too well – commies were not producing anything so frivolous as hand lotion. The elites were able to buy Nivea from their own stores but we did not have such imported luxuries.

One patient asked me if I worked in the mall – why else would I bring such stuff to them as lotion, chocolate, oranges, and socks? I must have some overstock in my private warehouse. I just smiled and walked on.