The Anxiety of Richard (Community Outings Finally Resume)!

Richard redux. I just (re) learned that older adults in nursing homes are simply just adults that happen to be older - and they've been traumatized by lockdowns just like the rest of us.

In “Annual Reassessment of a NH Resident post-COVID: The Story of Richard,” I talked about an annual reassessment of 82 year old, post-stroke patient Richard, the very likeable West Virgian and Korean War vet whom I met with for an annual reassessment awhile back.

Like I mentioned before - Richard has always been a very likeable fellow, very social on our unit. I have some updates - since I last posted, his wife finally visited the nursing home, and they were able to spend some time in his room, behind closed doors, hopefully unmasked.

Not only that, there’s been some movement on the outings front! Due to some lobbying by our social work staff and some thawing of the glacial status in our everpresent COVID “mitigations,” we finally have been able to orchestrate our first nursing-home sanctioned “community outing.” There was some discussion amongst the RT staff but they settled on a weekday farmer’s market (outdoors, obviously) on the next town over.

I, of course, was extremely excited for my residents. This was great!

As the day approached, I mentioned it to several nurses and a couple of the residents as well (I didn’t want to over-advertise it - RT was a little nervous about this as well, it was the first time out in going-on-three years).

Running into Richard

A few days before the big event I ran into Richard with one of our RTs near my office. I hadn’t seen him in awhile and he seemed to be in good spirits, so I struck up a conversation with him.

“Hey Richard! How are you? Have you heard about the outing? They’ll be hitting the farmer’s market downtown!”

Richard said he had, and said it sounded good, but he didn’t say anything else. He had a strange look on his face I couldn’t quite place.

“So what do you think? It’s the first time we’ve had an outing in almost three years! It should be really good! Do you want to go?”

Richard’s face looked really strained, he looked really uncomfortable. He finally said

“No doc, I don’t think I can do that - I think I’ll be too nervous.”

To be honest - when he said this - it didn’t compute for me. And so I did something I mildly regret right now - I pressured him a bit.

“C’mon Richard! It’s your first chance to get out of here in almost three years! Imagine how great that will be!”

Richard started stuttering a little, looking flustered, and our very nice Recreation Therapist finally, gently intervened (which instantly caused me to feel guilty), reassuring Richard it was OK, there will be a next time. She shot me a surreptitious look as if to say “back off doc,” which I did. I offered Richard a bit of soothing reassurance to back up our RT and watched them head away from my office to whatever it is they were doing next.

I then realized something. Richard has been seeing only masked faces of staff for the last, almost three years now (aside from the residents too demented to comply with masks, as well as the ones who just refuse and nurses gave up on forcing).

He’s been seeing these:

And these:

And this

And of course a neverending parade, lots and lots of these:

While the rest of the world has moved on, while we’ve all had unmasked parties for months (and in some places, years) now, people have gone back to work, and so many have put COVID behind them, my residents have been under a constant state of alarm and emergency, nonstop, since then.

They’ve been traumatized.

Yes, it’s not just Twitter, and far-left progressive kuku colleges like Amherst, and those people you still see in the streets wearing N95s on bicycles and in their cars. There are mentally broken people still everywhere.

They are also in my nursing home - some of the most traumatized of them all - helpless victims of nonstop coronaphobia.

Conclusion

In the end, the community outing happened. Three residents attended, Richard did not. I’m hoping the next time, it will turn out better.

It’s going to take a long time to get everyone back to normal mentally.

The lockdowns, mask mandates, the “vaccine passports,” the scaring people intentially - we’ve done lasting emotional and mental damage to so many people.

This is going to take lots of patience. And leadership.

Looking around, particularly post election season in the United States - it’s hard to see where we can find much of either.