Confused Cantankerous Stubborn

There are times when you are never sure whether a person is confused or just stubborn and cantankerous. While I was 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 even my own loving grandmother Rebecca Rugg Miner falls under the confused and stubborn category. She was admitted to my hospital with a medical problem that required an intravenous antibiotic. As a farmer’s wife raising eight children she was never used to staying in her bed. My grandmother decided that she didn’t like being in bed and she didn’t like being attached to the I.V. trying to pull out the needle. To keep her in the hospital bed and maintain the I.V. site intact, the nurses restrained her arms only freeing her at each mealtime to allow her to eat unencumbered.

As the nursing supervisor and her grandson, one of her nurses paged me to please come to the floor. Once there the nurse showed the cloth straps of my grandma’s restraints and a purloined butter knife. Gram had secreted the knife from her lunch tray and later unobserved began to saw her way to freedom from the bothersome restraints. The frayed straps were the evidence. I have said before that my grandmother Miner was creative intelligent, resourceful, and of course stubborn.