Confused Cantankerous Stubborn

There are times when you are never sure whether a person is confused or just stubborn and cantankerous. While a nurse at Frick Hospital in Mt. Pleasant, Pennsylvania, an elderly man was frequently admitted for Chronic Heart Failure. Living at home, he refused to follow the doctor’s instructions to limit the amount of fluids he was allowed consume. This would cause fluid to build in his circulatory system and he would return to the hospital with severe shortness of breath and a need be readmitted.

Each time after a period of drying out in an intensive care unit, he would be transferred to a med/surg unit. Even there, he refused comply with the fluid restrictions. In his bathroom of his room, he had easy access to water and was on the verge of being transferred back to ICU. The nurses moved him into a private room and had maintenance shut off water to the sink. They thought that he could only get the fluids that the they gave him. Not so, a nurse caught him getting water from the bedpan sprayer and when that was cut off, he actually dipped water from the commode with his drinking cup.

We finally forced him use a potty chair by completely shutting off all water to his room. After many changes in his treatment and in spite of himself he improved to the point we could send him home again.

I guess my own loving grandmother Miner would fall under the confused and stubborn category. She was admitted to the hospital with a medical problem that required an intravenous antibiotic. She was a farmer’s wife, raising eight children and was never used to staying in bed. For several years she had lived in a nursing home because she no longer able to care for herself. We tried to allow her to stay in her home with a caretaker, but that didn’t work out.

In the hospital bed, my grandmother constantly tried to pull out the needle from her I.V. To keep the I.V. site intact, the nurses were required to restrain her arms, only freeing her at each mealtime to eat unencumbered.

As supervisor and grandson, I got a page from one of her nurses to please come to the floor. Once there, the nurse showed the straps to my grandma’s restraints and a butter knife. Gram had secreted the knife from her lunch tray and had begun to saw her way free from the restraints. Frayed straps were the evidence, but that was my grandmother Miner, intelligent, resourceful, and stubborn.