Oh the beauties of porcelain!

As a CNA we tend to see a lot of strange behaviors and actions from patients that you would never have imagined in your life. One of those was a graveyard where a patient had sundowners and was known for some less than ordinary behavior after the sun went down, and this night was no different. It was in the middle of the graveyard shift, and a smell was coming from his room, that when investigated and on first survey the source wasn’t found. Upon entering the bathroom it was discovered that this 80-something year old had climbed up onto the sink, pooped in it, then climbed back down and gotten back into bed. That was a one-time instance, and how glad I am that it hasn’t happened again, but this leads me to tell of another patient’s strange habit which is still enough to bring a smile to my face every time I think about it.

When I first met this patient, she was on the toilet. No big deal right? Everybody goes to the bathroom, a natural thing. However, the next time I came into her room to give her the evening dinner tray, she was still there. I checked my watch to see how long it had been since I had last seen her there. It was a three hour difference. I passed it off as coincidence and went about my night. I went to go put her to bed and she was on the toilet again. This time I slipped out in the hallway to ask another aide about her frequency of BR (bathroom) visits, to which she responded that she (the patient) had indeed not left the toilet since about seven that morning. “I’m sorry, what?!” was the response running through my head. The aide proceeded to explain to me that this patient loved sitting on the toilet, and it was daily ritual for her to sit on the toilet every day, all day, only leaving for meals when she got famished, which was once a day usually. Even though she didn’t leave the toilet for most meals, she always wanted to eat the meals that had been sitting out for hours and hours, even once yelling at an aide who refused to let her eat shrimp that had been sitting out for six hours at room temperature (which for her, by the way, was around 82 degrees F)

Some of my favorite moments with this patient were spent squatting in front of the toilet getting her dressed for the night, having long talks, and laughing with her. She had the funniest sense of humor, and was always joking around and teasing one aide in front of the other. Her BR became the place to hang out and laugh, with many of those laughs shared late at night when we would finally have to try and pull her off of the toilet. She would literally sink in and become stuck on the toilet seat, it would take at least two aides and a heck of a lot of lotion to get her off. Speaking of lotion, when I picture this patient in my mind, I think of her sitting in that small BR rubbing lotion on her knobby bent fingers, which she did several times a day, as well as putting together her pad and brief set for the night, which often was one button brief, two pads precisely lined up together, and one panty-liner, if memory serves me right. Learning that combination was the hardest thing I did as a new CNA.

She passed away some time ago, and I don’t know if she passed away while she was on the toilet, but when I get to the other side I will most certainly ask her what the appeal was, and I bet her mansion has many toilets, or maybe just one amazing, high functioning tech one, we’ll see :)