Badge holder

Badges

I clock in and learn I’m on a 1-to-1, when one staff member spends the entire shift shadowing one particularly disoriented/violent/suicidal patient.

Wonderful. Just wonderful.

My 1-to-1 has mental retardation along with bizarre compulsive behaviors. When I walk onto the unit, he’s rocking back and forth in a chair, occasionally dipping down to brush his nose and lips against the table. When he does, two clip-on badges flap on his shirt, one from our hospital and the other from Decatur Ambulatory Surgery Center. I’m told he wears the badges every day, even when he’s not in the hospital. Also, he bit the tech who was watching him last shift.



Badges doesn’t want to watch TV or color or any of the other things I try to get him to do. He just rocks back and forth, mumbling to himself. He makes a few grabs for my badge, to add it to his collection. I finally take it off and stick it in my pocket. At dinner, Badges eats with his fingers. When I tell him to use a spoon, he grabs it by the bowl end and tries to scoop up food with the handle. I let him eat with his fingers and put him in the shower afterwards, but even that’s a trial. Every two seconds or so, he jump out of the shower, and I have to keep snapping at him to get back in.

I don’t need this hassle. I’ve promised people I could deliver a finished manuscript by July. Right now, it’s only a “manuscript” in the most theoretical sense, really just some scribbled-through notebooks featuring a main character I don’t like much brooding for pages over rivers and death and Johnny Cash’s guitar.

I’m getting desperate–queasy, sweaty-palmed desperate. Doors are closing all around me, opportunities are fading, and I can’t take them because I’m wasting all my time reminding Badges to use toothpaste when he brushes his teeth.

After the shower, Badges decides...

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