What My Patients' Said Volume 1

I've recently started a new job in the care of the elderly department and work on a ward that has a large number of patients with dementia and similar conditions. Some of the things they come out with are hilarious. 

Two of our nonagenarians are war veterans and yesterday my consultant thought it would be nice to introduce them, especially as they're in opposite beds. One was in the marines, and had a marine visiting him and the other was in the RAF. The marines seemed quite happy, but RAF man didn't really engage, but instead wanted to show my boss a photo of his war memorial. One of the marines started telling him about what regiment etc. he'd been in and the RAF man very firmly said "I don't care what regiment you were in, I'm trying to talk about what I have done!". Fortunately the marine was too deaf to hear this, but he asked us to repeat it! (Clearly we didn't...)

We have a couple of younger patients (50s/60s), one male, one female, who have brain injuries and are very physically fit but struggle mentally. They're quite difficult to manage because they're so fit so they move around a lot causing no end of trouble. The female patient, lets call her Judy wanders a lot and doesn't understand other people's boundaries. She loves to write in people's charts and rearrange files and will happily sit on other patients' beds or come into their cubicle while they're on the commode. She also loves 'tidying up' which greatly upset my SHO when she throw away his coffee! 

Our male, let's call him Tony, has severe paranoia and delusions. He gets quite agitated as he's very fast mentally and can't understand why he's being kept in hospital when he thinks there's nothing wrong with him. He'll almost convince you that he's got nothing wrong with him, until he says he must be fine, he was just up in Scotland that morning.

The other day they met, but unfortunately it wasn't a budding romance! Tony became fixated on the idea that Judy had stolen his bag containing a large sum of money that he had got out of the bank that morning (he hasn't left the hospital in over a month). He's actually much improved, he used to think he was spending his days fighting terrorists, so now his paranoia isn't totally unfounded... But they had this huge altercation on the ward which was kinda hilarious because both of them are totally delusional and it was brilliant watching them trying to reason with each other.

This morning I had my first experience of the weekly fire alarm test on my new ward. Where I used to work in surgery the patients merrily ignored it, but in a ward of dementia patients that's easier said then done! My favourite quote was "Will somebody answer the bloody phone!"

It's not just the patients causing havoc. I learnt today one of our nursing auxillaries believes she's a psychic and a few weeks ago told our occupational therapist that she was pregnant. Instead of laughing the OT became really concerned and was asking where she could buy a pregnancy test. She then called her boyfriend and said she had something really important she had to talk to him about, but wouldn't tell him what over the phone! Unsurprisingly she's not pregnant...