If you’re not yet elderly,
this is what could happen to you.
Anything you say about elderly people now goes into ears
and could come out of mouths to you when you are elderly.
My 81 year old friend who lives alone and sometimes has trouble walking fell and broke her toe. She was already on pain medication that was supposed to follow a plan, but she took extra so she could move around her house on her broken toe.
She ran out of medication a few days before her next pain clinic appointment. Before I got to her house the day before her appointment, she had already tried calling the clinic. She wanted to talk to a nurse about getting pain medication just for that day so she could get to her appointment without pain the next day.
No nurse called her back, so she called again. My friend called so many times trying to talk to a nurse that I forget how often she called. I talked to a couple of receptionists myself.
One receptionist lectured my friend about “breaking” her pain contract.
Another receptionist said she would put “priority call” on the message to the nurses. When no nurse called back after close to 2 hours, my friend called again. That receptionist hung up on her.
My friend made yet another try before I left. She was still waiting for a nurse to call her back. She was still in pain from a broken toe. She was unable to eat the lunch we had planned to share because of her pain.
My friend never got a call back from a nurse. Two of us took her to her pain appointment. She explained using the pain pills up faster because of her broken toe.
The doctor said, “That’s when you call for more medication.”
The doctor said NOTHING about my friend breaking her pain contract.
She INCREASED the pain medication dosage for 2 months to get my friend through the broken bone healing process.
The doctor was EXACTLY what my friend needed.
The receptionists and nurses were CRUEL.
I wrote a scathing Google review of the clinic the night of the cruelty. I wrote an update the next day after my friend was home. The reply was “deeply sorry” for the “distressing experience” and asked us to call the patient relations department.
Since the dates were on my review and update, the clinic was able to look up which receptionists and nurses had decided that my 81 year old friend deserved cruelty.
Cruelty can backfire, as those receptionists and nurses discovered.
No elderly person deserves cruelty,
including you when you are elderly.
THINK before you put words into ears.
© Paula M. Kramer, 2024
All rights reserved.
