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The room smelled like urine and nostalgia, and although both scents were understandable, they were no less tragic for their predictability.
The combination of underpaid elder care workers and the desperation that attaches to a dementia ward and all who enter it guaranteed that for however long this ride lasted, it wouldn’t be a pleasant one.
In my grandmother’s case, she had been here for nearly a month following a short stint at the hospital for a kidney infection. In that time, her health had deteriorated rapidly — a problem she seemed to share with everyone else on the floor.
If this was God’s waiting room, God was clearly tired of waiting.
The man sitting in front of us had pissed himself, either in anticipation of his family’s visit or because he had become frustrated with how long it was taking them to arrive. He had been sitting there for 20 minutes, and still, no one had checked on him, the effluent now trickling down the front of his chair in search of the floor. Another patient was wandering around screaming out for her husband, still another for his wife whose name he kept changing with every new outburst.
