* Age I: The Sunny Seats.
Posted on September 22nd, 2008 by The Shop Keeper. Filed under AMPSR, The Kaiser.
This is Part 1 of a series called “Age, Money, Performance, Speed, Reform“. As I mentioned in the prologue, these posts form a a build on the “get fat quick chicken” post and are part of my central argument for something very exciting that will be hopefully happening soon.
Part 1, is about Age, and as the original post was very, very long, I have decided to split it up into a series of posts that will appear throughout this week.
So this is Age I.
One of the worst jobs that I have ever had was back in the summer of 1989. I was a young art student in my summer holidays and in desperate need of some cash and Jason, a fellow Student from my days at Portsmouth college of arts, had given me a tip off that one of the best paying summer jobs going was mopping floors at our local general hospital. He’d done it the summer before and assured me that apart from the ridiculously early start (which doesn’t seem so early now) the job was an absolute doddle. So I went along and got the job (I was qualified because I was halfway sober and could hold a mop). The job was potentially simple; mop the floors, clean the toilets, make cups of tea for the patients and supply biscuits as and when needed. An edge of difficulty was only added depending on the ward that you were given to work on. I can’t remember what ward Jason worked on but I sure as hell know what ward I got given.
I got the geriatric ward.
The six weeks mopping floors on the geriatric ward of Southampton General hospital changed me completely and it is the only job I have ever had that I have properly despised. Not because of what it was menial labour - my mother was a cleaner right up until her retirement and what was good enough for mum was good enough for me and it was openly discussed amongst the full time cleaning staff of the hospital that the job of cleaning on the geriatric ward was particularly “challenging”, no, I despised the job because I had never and have never since been in such a place of complete and utter despair. It was the parking lot of death. Worse still, it was a place completely void of all respect.
Everyday I would quietly clean the floors, supply cups of tea and give an extra biscuit here and there to adults who had stepped over the threshold of being grown up and old into the twilight zone of old and a burden only to be shooed away to clean the toilets by the over zealous senior staff nurse when visiting time came.
I wasn’t supposed to be seen by “the relatives” and I wasn’t supposed to see them, and the way they treated there former parent like a child. It seemed to me that, without exception, the children of our patients were punishing there parent for all the sweets that they never got, for all the evenings they had to be in before ten o’clock at night and for the fact that they were still alive. Yes, they were pretty angry that dad hadn’t just pissed off out of it - like Mr. Jones had the day before (I’d found Mr. Jones the day before. Dead, in the toilet.)
When the relatives had gone the nurses swarmed out into the ward and placed those high back chairs that you can only find in hospitals at the foot of each of the patients bed facing the window. One by one the patients where plucked skillfully from there beds and placed into “the sunny seats” where they were to spend the rest of the day staring out of the window. Day in, day out; tea and biscuits from the spotty art student, a visit from the psychopathic offspring and an afternoon in the sunny seat.
It was heartbreaking. It is still heart breaking.
Now, as we all know, the world is getting older and we’re not having enough kids. This is what the United Nations “World Population Ageing 2007” report has to say:
Population ageing is unprecedented, a process without parallel in the history of humanity. A population ages when increases in the proportion of older persons (that is, those aged 60 years or over) are accompanied by reductions in the proportion of children (persons under age 15) and then by declines in the proportions of persons in the working ages (15 to 59). This leads to the big reduction in the support ratio.
In 2000, the population aged 60 years or over numbered 600 million, triple the number present in 1950. In 2006, the number of older persons had surpassed 700 million. By 2050, 2 billion older persons are projected to be alive, implying that their number will once again triple over a span of 50 years.
Globally the population of older persons is growing at a rate of 2.6 per cent per year, considerably faster than the population as a whole which is increasing at 1.1 per cent annually.
Today the median age for the world is 28 years, that is, half the world’s population is below that age and the other half is above it. The country with the youngest population is Uganda, with a median age of 15 years, and the oldest is Japan, with a median age of 43 years. Over the next four decades, the world’s median age will likely increase by ten years, to reach 38 years in 2050.
So what does my little story have to do with the UN report, fast strategies, marketing, advertising and business?
- Respect
- Culture (young vs. old - west vs. east)
- Shortsightedness
Tomorrow, I’ll try and explain why.
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8 Responses to “Age I: The Sunny Seats.”
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September 22nd, 2008 at 9:27 am
i’m interested to see where this post goes opi (funny how our nicknames are strangely appropriate sometimes).
a dear friend of mine, with an elderly father who needs full-time care has just been told that the german state will no longer support him. she’s in another country and she may earn OK for a single woman, but not so much for someone with a dependent father. which means that she’ll probably put off having children a whole lot longer, as she won’t be able to afford to have both a dependent father and a dependent child. vicious cycle.
September 22nd, 2008 at 9:51 am
My Dad was put in a geriatric ward after one of his many strokes purely because the hospital was ‘full’ and it was the only place left could find to put him.
I absolutely agree with you as regards how depressing it was …
It was more than a car park to die … it was also a meeting place for the mean and dis-spirited. Infact the only consistently ‘nice’ people were the patients because the visitors [who most of the time were noticable by their absence] treated their once beloved family members like they were holding back on something they felt they were overdue [ie: their inheritence] and the nurses [though not all] tended to treat the patients like they were no longer worth the effort except at visiting times, where they would suddenly put on this false sense of happiness like you’d get from a member of staff at Butlins.
It was the most depressing place on earth - an energy vampire made up of 4 walls - where each day a bed would have a new person in it with no mention of the person who’d been there before.
The and nurses hated the fact my Mum would sit with my Dad from morning till because they felt she was a spy whereas the visitors hated my Mum because it made them feel guilty … and yet, amongst all the noise and mayhem of the poor patients who simply did not know what they were doing … the beautiful thing was my Dad - who was very ill [infact we thought the DR's had put my Dad in there on purpose because they thought he was going to die and didn't want to tell us] - saw all these terribly ill and fragile people and must of felt he wasn’t as bad as them so actually got better.
OK, he never made a full recovery, but given we’d been told he had just 24 hours to live 4 days earlier AND he was in a place that was ‘made’ for death … he was seemingly inspired to live - so as much as I hate that place [I can still remember the smell] I can never feel as much misery towards it as Ward F54, where he eventually did pass away, but surrounded by ill people, not seconds from death people.
Lovely post Marcus - you brought this memory back to me and it’s actually a good one, which is quite weird.
September 22nd, 2008 at 11:37 am
That’s an interesting start of the week. I still remember the last weeks of the old lady that lived next door. Meike and me would drive to the geriatric ward of Klinik Nord in Hamburg after work. Though nobody says Klinik Nord here. In Hamburg they just say “Ochsenzoll”. It stands for two things: the training ground of our local Bundesliga football club and the area where they keep maniacs, rapists, murderers and the elderly with Alzheimer, dementia and so on.
It was Winter. Getting dark early. And the area would be like a park with slightly illuminated houses every once in a while. It’s a place Alfred Hitchcock would have to come up with if it didn’t exist. So we entered the house every second day. Mostly the building was silent, only there were some screams now and then. It felt like the waiting room to hell. With that smell that I would call the smell of death. And inbetween was this lovely old lady (and she was not the only lovely one). For me she didn’t quite fit here.
Only two month ago I had sat in front of her in the living room in her flat on the first floor of our house. She would have said something like “My love, take a seat and make yourself comfortable”. And she actualy said that in English as she had lived in New York for a while (she had that unbelievable lovely way to pronounce “5th Avenue”). Usually she had a small bowl with pretzels for me and a tiny plate with chocolate coated ginger for her, right next to the local newspaper from Hamburg and the Herald Tribune that she still read every day. So there we were. Sitting in comfy old chairs and talking. And she had a lot to tell. Of her life during World War II, her firts husband, how she met the second one, how she went to New York, about her daughter who was professor at the American University in Paris and about all the places she had seen in her life. It was brilliant. I still remember the smell of her apartement. And how good it felt when she hugged me and gave me a kiss on cheek.
And now she was sitting on this bed in the waiting room to hell. She had lost weight as she had refused to eat. Sometimes she just looked at us and asked when we would get her out of here. I felt miserable and even more for all the other elderly people here. I have to admit that I don’t really remember how long she has been there and when they took her to another ward. I just remember that one cold evening we went there, both held her hand and she passed away. I always thought that she knew that we would come and that she waited until we arrived. And I am happy about that. Because as much as it broke my heart seeing her like that it would have destroyed me if I she would have died on her own. Now as years went by I even think that she wanted to die because she didn’t want to go to a home for the old. She must have noticed that with over 90 years she needed help more often and that we couldn’t give her as much a hand as she needed it. And so I think she decided that she rather wanted to die than to live in an old people’s home. She had her own head. And that’s why we loved and still love her.
Well that’s my two pennies on that topic. Hope it all made sense and there are not too many spelling mistakes in it.
September 23rd, 2008 at 11:18 am
I did exactly the same job during sixth form holidays (Xmas/Summer) for a couple of years. It changed me too, I tried in some way to put on my happy face, but working as a housekeeper in Geriatrics was an awful awful job. Why did I do it so long? I formed attachments with many of the patients, and it was very distressing at times. As was the other ward I covered - the Terminal Cancer ward. I think both jobs affected me deeply and I wish someone would start addressing this properly.
Dartington is making noises about turning Foxhole into an ‘active community’ for the elderly. We’ll see.
September 24th, 2008 at 12:53 pm
Good post Marcus. Interested too to see where this goes…
September 24th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
Thanks everybody for some cracking comments. I’m aware that I’m behind on posting the next part - which I’ll try and put up later this evening.
September 24th, 2008 at 3:06 pm
[...] So this is Age II (Age I can be found here). [...]
September 29th, 2008 at 9:24 pm
[...] müsste The Kaiser uns (zwischen seinen derzeit lesenswerten Ausführungen zu “Age”) erklären, ob er tatsächlich auch bei den [...]