I’m in need of a bigger alligator gun. I am up to my ass in them, and they think they’re winning.

I’m providing nursing care for 42 residents in a two-building, 60-bed facility. They are all here because they failed placements at other facilities for behavioural reasons. Lots of LTC facilities have “memory units,” and take demented old Granny as long as she can pay. But as soon as she starts screaming at the wallpaper, eating off of everyone’s plate but hers, delivering poop presents to staff, peeing in the fireplace, and getting naked before arts and crafts, they send her packing.

That’s where a facility like this comes in. It’s set up to safely house and care for the soon-to-be-homeless schizo seniors, the demented dodderers, the hitters, the kickers, the spitters, and the screamers. The youngest residents are in their 40s, the oldest in their 90s. Some have as many as 12 failed placements before they end up in a facility like this.

I spent the day wheedling med orders out of distant docs. I was polite when I told one doc that her wound care order was [barbaric] and 50 years behind the times. I shoveled one resident into a cab three times, only to have her exit out the other side three times. I finally had to send for a cab with lockable doors. My staff is uneducated, and although some have potential, some need to find other jobs. I have conversations that involve invisible refrigerators (it was in her stomach), “purple sixteens,” the people in the television [off] who tell them to not take their pills, poisoned food (the “twelve-inch people” do it), and missing hair. One resident called the police on me today when I wouldn’t get her a pregnancy test (“Polly, you’re 81 and you yell ‘whoop! whoop!’ every time you poop. I’m not thinking the guys around here are lining up outside your door at night to do the granny-hop with you”).

My first week in the new job as DON – 60+ hours – I spent defending the facility against a Statement of Deficiency from the state that ran 76 pages (it arrived Monday afternoon, my first day). Six IJs (immediate jeopardy tags), and 21 other nursing citations – the state closed one of their  buildings to new admissions. I had no idea that on my first day as DON I would go from the frying pan into the fire. I had to write a policy manual for the facility from scratch, and provide the nursing care for 42 psychiatric and advanced dementia patients (four of whom I discovered had pressure ulcers; there would be more).

At the end of two weeks, I was fried. The weekend came, and I tried to crawl inside a scotch bottle and hide. It didn’t work, Monday still found me.