To quote Sheldon, under normal circumstances I'd say I told you so. But, as I have told you so with such vehemence and frequency already the phrase has lost all meaning. Therefore, I will be replacing it with the phrase, I have informed you thusly.

Fucked. I'm fucked. Or am I an ass in the end? I actually fired a nurse from my team. Since there are no orderlies anyway, I afford myself the luxury of being choosy. Well, luxury. What's a luxury? My life, that's luxury. My style, that's luxury. My lifestyle, yes, that's definitely luxury. I've worked hard for it for decades. No exaggeration. I'm really such an old fart. I've just kept myself in good shape. At least as far as that's concerned.

But saying goodbye to a carer, is that what you do?

Yes, I think so. I could overlook the fact that he washed me with disinfectant. I could explain to him that it really had no place on my real wood parquet. I lived with the fact that he simply didn't understand linguistically that he basically put my nose mask on far too tightly. He didn't understand either when I wrote to him about it or when several friends made a hopeless attempt to communicate it. I have to live with the fact that my nose had just healed after weeks of irritation and now I have a decubitus on my tine again.

Well, that may also have been due to the miserable failure of the mask change. It's interesting. First you complain about your colleagues who didn't reassemble the mask after cleaning. Then you reassemble it wrong. The nose part is at the bottom and the mouth at the top. A blind man with a cane can see that this can't work. And again you complain about your colleagues. This time complaining that they put the mask together wrong. Yes, which is it? You have to make up your mind already. Not that it makes any difference. You put the mask on me, you should have checked it first. Anyway, you then - for whatever reason - took everything apart and made things even worse. After 90 minutes of trying to change the mask, during which you didn't even notice how you put the nose mask in my mouth instead of on my nose, I resigned myself and had to sleep with the nose mask on. Or at least I tried. 36 hours of nasal mask, perhaps not ideal.

Other anecdotes almost sound funny. I thought I'd been kicked by a horse when you left the dishwasher running at three in the morning. Which, mind you, is in the same room as the one I sleep in. Or how you switched on all 38 Philips HUE lamps in my bedroom at 100% on Sunday morning at 6 a.m. to hang up the laundry.

Speaking of laundry. That's where it stops for me. It's bad enough that you always put my whole bed under water during basic care, which I can't stand at all. No, you absolutely had to make me lie naked and wet in bed for two hours against my will, while you comfortably reupholstered all the decorative pillows. Which had already been freshly covered the night before. Just as you didn't accept a "no", a "stop it" or a "it hurts me" from me, you didn't respect my wish for a blanket. She would get wet, you said. You didn't care that I was freezing.

The consequence? Cystitis. Antibiotics. Painkillers. Thank you very much.

Yes, you can and apparently must fire a nurse sometimes. Unfortunately. Good night. To a better one than my last nights.

image_pdfSave page as PDF