Life at the ECC

THE PLACE

The Hines VA ECC is a geriatric nursing home. I am by far the youngest person there if you don't count the vegetables. Not a pretty word, but an apt description. The young guys live next door and across the hall and there is nothing there. The rest of the patients are either bed ridden, wheelchair bound or barely mobile. I am likely the youngest quasi healthy person there and it seems I am the most mobile. It is supposed to be a half mile journey from the ECC to the main hospital and I believe that. The nurses are always surprised when I tell them I plan to walk every day and not ride in a wheel chair. Although it isn't too bad, the routines may kill me.

So far I have been woken up at 3am to take my vitals and at 5:30 am to draw blood. Morning meds come between 5-6:30am and breakfast follows between 6:30-7:00 am.

It seems that you can opt to eat in your room or in the dining hall. I think that if you want to choose what you get to eat, you may have to eat it in the dining room. What I do know is that eating crappy food in bed alone while watching crappy tv is never as much fun as chatting up the old farts. Besides, it forces some of the patients out of their beds and moving.

THE FOOD

We are eating hospital food, nuff said. It is a matter of degrees of edibleness. I have yet to taste the elusive chocolate pudding and am already tired of canned fruit. People can choose to eat in the room or in the dining room. Breakfast in bed works for me but because I asked to be able to choose my meals off the menu, I believe I am stuck eating breakfast in the dining room and not in bed. Hell, I wear my jammies to breakfast. Most of the other men are wearing theirs, I figure fair game.

The food tends to be very bland, generally soft and they are not fans of fresh ingredients. I finally hunted down the nutritionist and now I am able to select from a menu every day except for the Ensure Plus I now have to drink twice a day for the protein. It seems that radiation burns protein calories?? I do find myself buying snacks at the canteen, which is almost all the way to the main hospital, so quite the hike. I keep telling myself that bag of chips is NOT worth the walk so I just stay home.

A typical breakfast includes frozen waffles, canned fruit, toast, margarine type spread, fruit juice a small thing of milk and a cup of coffee in a plastic cup. Most mornings we also get a small box of some type of cereal. The eggs are simply inedible. They swear they were not powdered eggs, but whatever they are, they are caca laca. The nurse jumped down my throat when I said I was hoping to lose a few pounds. Of course, this was before I saw a menu and realized that the mile hike to treatment and the food they were giving me wouldn't require any extra effort on my part.

THE ROOM

The beds are hospital beds and the pillows and mattresses are covered in plastic. Although they adjust, they are far from comfortable and I won't even start on the sheets and blankets. The rooms are double rooms with some rooms sharing a bathroom between the rooms. Because I am a girl, I was put in a double room with a non-share bathroom. The bathrooms are quite large and there is a sink both inside and outside the bathroom so when I am taking a shower, the nurse can still give my roomie a sponge bath. There is a locker for each patient and a dresser and nightstand for each person as well. I have a key to the locker but have been told by staff and patients that the locks don't mean anything as everyone seems to have a key to all the rooms.

THE ROOMIE

Got the place to myself my first night in and slept rather well. I about froze my ass off in the A/C, but grabbed a clean blanket off the cart in the hall and was warmer the second night. My roommate moved in during the day in Wednesday while I was running about to various appointments. When I came in to prep for supper she was getting out of the bathroom and there was an alarm going off from the wound vac machine she was supposed to have been hooked up to. The alarm was going off to beat the band. A nurse was called, she was reattached and the alarm was silenced, until an hour or so later when she attempted to do it herself and managed to forget to clamp the ends of the tube so that wound fluid poured all over the bathroom floor and the floor of the room. The next morning I made sure housekeeping was called to mop the floors, but by day two, the bathroom reeks again of pee.

My roomie is an older black woman who served during Viet Nam. I think she had a colostomy bag line installed and the wound is hooked up to the wound vac. While she is able to move, she has to disconnect her machine to do it. Needless to say, we got NO sleep the first night she was in. Last night I asked the nurse to let her go pee and then hook her back BEFORE we went to sleep. No clue how she made out, but I slept like a baby.

This was a first draft and just rough notes for those insomniacs who couldn't wait for me with a cup of coffee in my hand! I have now at least spell checked so it is a bit of an easier read.