Today seems to be a very calm, normal day at the nursing home. Except for the antibiotic treatments that nurse Yevhenia is administering throughout the day, there is no evidence of a health crisis. Here’s hoping that this flu season winds down quietly over the next few days.
The new hire, Ailiona, appeared as hoped this morning, and helped nurse Yevhenia until after lunch was served. Yevhenia told me that Ailiona is happy helping out with meal service, but not very interested in helping with hygiene and sanitation. I guess that means I’ll still have a place on the team roster here at the nursing home.
I recently wrote about my new practice of making a quick check through the rooms in the morning before breakfast, and the fallout that resulted. Initially I naively supposed that if I just discovered a problem and reported it to the regular nursing home staff, they would thank me and quickly go to take care of it (with me trailing along to help out). But I quickly realized that the nursing home staff really didn’t need me to do that – if they had bandwidth to deal with all these problems I was finding, they could easily do the same quick check I was doing. So my quick check was yielding marginal benefit at the cost of significantly increased angst and frustration.
Now, I’m still making the early morning quick check, but I’m scoping it strictly to issues I can solve by myself, for instance repositioning pillows, emptying bed pans, scrubbing and flushing the toilets in the lavatories and mopping up spills. I’m not “peeking under the covers” to check for wet diapers any more.
Tragically, I’m also not responding to evident calls for assistance. Because of the language barrier, I can’t understand the nature of these requests, so all I can do is report back to Yevhenia that so-and-so is asking for help. Then she has to drop whatever she’s doing to go see what is wrong. Usually it’s a minor discomfort that the requester themself would probably have been embarrassed to especially call Yevhenia into the room for. In other words, if a caregiver is in the room, it is reasonable to ask for help, but everyone (except me) understands it’s not worth asking a caregiver to make a special trip.
This rationale includes changing diapers. Because the nursing home is so short-staffed, everything needs to be done on a triage basis – and changing a wet diaper is generally not treated as an emergency priority. So even if my nose tells me someone probably needs to have a diaper changed, I am not “peeking under the covers.” Changing diapers is a very personal matter. It’s too awkward and potentially offensive for me to attempt by myself as an outsider (mainly because of the language barrier).

On a side note, I have not seen any bed sore issues here, despite long overnight hours in wet diapers. Whenever the nurse notices a red spot, she applies some ointment and moves on, and this seems to work.
I’ve rationalized the practice of ignoring requests for help by reminding myself that in any event these people would be in at least as much discomfort if I weren’t here doing volunteer work in their nursing home as they are if I ignore their incomprehensible requests for attention and just focus my attention on emptying bed pans and mopping floors. But I try to be respectful of their feelings too, lest they misunderstand my apparent indifference as contempt and arrogance. I don’t speak much Ukrainian yet, but I have mastered the useful explanatory phrase, “I’m sorry, I’m an American, I don’t understand Ukrainian.”
It can’t be understated how much joy a little bit of extra personal attention brings to each of the invalid residents of this nursing home. If you are able to take time to personally come and help, that would be marvelous. If you speak or are studying Ukrainian or Russian, that would be even more fantastic, because verbal communication is so crucial for providing more humane care, as I hope this blog post has illustrated. If it’s impractical for you to come in person, please consider making a monetary contribution, which could help defray the expenses of a RAYA volunteer “in the field”. In either case, please feel free to take a look at the RAYA community page for more details about how you may be able to help out.