The Dagley Dagley Daily

By Janet Dagley Dagley
Covering the world from the waterfront in Hoboken, New Jersey, USA

ISSN 1544-9114

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Fallen: Part 1

Her name is Hope. And the name fits, even though her day-to-day life doesn't seem to offer much: she's on her feet from the beginning of her shift to the end, or to the end of the next person's shift if she has to work overtime, emptying bedpans, moving patients who can't move themselves, checking vital signs, dispensing meals, listening to complaints -- the jam-packed to-do list of the lowest-ranking aide in a small suburban nursing home. If she pauses to sit, it's most likely at the bedside of one of her loneliest charges for a few moments of friendly conversation, or in the TV lounge while keeping watch on a half-dozen or so wheelchair-bound elderly residents. She hopes someday to become a full-fledged nurse, but for now she's studying and learning on the job. Even though she's in school full time, she's still years away from reaching that goal. First, she has to finish her last year of high school.

Hope is one of the real-world angels now taking care of my mother, who fell and broke numerous bones just before the year began. There were angels looking after her in the hospital, too, but those didn't seem as hopeful. Busy to the point of frantic, the hospital staff didn't get around to dealing with many of Mom's less life-threatening needs: they knew she'd be discharged before they could ever find time, and patients were ringing their call buttons all up and down the floor. Sometimes they got confused, like the nurse who insisted Mom would have to walk from her bed to the bathroom 2 days after her surgery, even though the doctor had written "NON WEIGHT BEARING FOR 3 MONTHS" on her chart. "Oh, that must have been another patient," the nurse admitted after Mom dug in her uninjured heel and refused to attempt walking. The nurse's beeper went off and she left without either apologizing or accomplishing the task she come to do: tending to the patient's toilet needs. At that point, I taught Mom a word to say loudly and clearly whenever she felt the treatment she was getting was doing her harm: IATROGENIC. Literal translation: "caused by the doctor." They may be angels, but health care workers are human, too.

Everybody makes mistakes, of course. One wrong decision, and any of us could end up just like Mom, our lives changed in a split second, with months and years of hard work required just to get back to the way things were before that mistake, or as close as it's possible to get.

Mom's trip to the hospital, and then the nursing home, showed me that she isn't the only one who has fallen. Our nation's social support network has fallen, too: stretched too thin and overloaded. So have our standards, and our expectations. Parts of it are still intact, of course, and I am so grateful to the farsighted, fair-thinking legislators of her and her parents' generations, who built the Social Security/Medicare system that has softened the impact of her fall.

But it isn't just the health care system. We've all fallen behind in one way or another. Those without jobs are giving up searching for them; those who have work are putting in longer hours than ever before, bringing work home in laptops, on call 24/7 by Blackberry. (Remember when only doctors got interrupted by work during their time off?) High school students with full-time jobs aren't even all that unusual these days, and they're working not just for pocket money but because their families need their income to make ends meet. College? They can only hope.

The other day, I wrote here about Philip K. Dick's novel Time Out of Joint, in which people live in a different time than they think they're in. But when schoolchildren are working full time at some of society's most unpleasant tasks, that's not a Philip K. Dick story: it's a Charles Dickens tale.

And like Mom's injuries, the damage to our nation's social and medical infrastructure will take much longer to repair than it took to inflict. It's going to take no less than a new New Deal. And that has to take priority over going back to the moon and on to Mars. Mr. Bush's telling the nation that we're going to the moon sounds to me more like Ralph Kramden than John Kennedy. At least he's not claiming Mars has weapons of mass destruction.

Ya wanna go to the moon? Ya wanna go to the moon? Ya wanna go to Mars? OK, Ralph. You can go to the moon. Mars too. But you have to wait, not just until Hope gets her high school diploma. Not just until she gets through college, somehow, and becomes a nurse. You have to wait until Hope and people like her have some hope that their world might offer a standard of living at least as good as the world her patients knew when they were her age, and some hope that years from now when she finds herself in their position, there'll be a Hope by her bed, too, and a support network that will pay for both.

Meanwhile, we've already made it to Mars: Spirit is rolling around there right now and sending back snapshots.

posted by Janet Dagley Dagley @5:04 PM

15.1.04