A Nursing Home Full of Mishearings (and Miswritings)

As you get older, you get worse at katakana, so suddenly, in the middle of work,
a "Mishearing Championship" is held.

I gave Mr./Ms. XX some Aquarias!

Aquarias?

Even though drug names sometimes change to generics despite having the same efficacy, everyone uses the old names, which causes confusion, and on top of that, they are often slightly wrong.

There is a patch medication called Tulobuterol Tape that expands the bronchi and makes it easier to breathe, and it has almost the same effect as Hokunalin Tape.
It's just a matter of absorption speed.
It's just hard to say.
The only people who have ever pronounced the string of characters (Tulobuterol) are medical staff.
Is it Tulobu-terol?
Or Tulobute-rol? I don't even feel like looking it up.

Because of things like this, since medical records have been digitized, they remain as written.
It was recorded as (Ate a Sooker Pack after breakfast), so I asked the person who wrote it,
"Don't you know? It's a big ice cream..."

It's Super Cup, you idiot! lol

Even so, since we all know everyone's medications,
we understand even when they say "that patch thing" or "the big white one that dissolves."

It turns into a mysterious space where conversations like a middle-aged couple's "do that thing with that thing in the fridge" intersect.
Dementia affects the memory medium in the brain called the "hippocampus."
For example, people do a mental "magical banana" game like apple -> red -> delicious -> like -> Ringo Shiina, but
sometimes they lose the ability to understand that it's red.
They forget from the outside of their memory, leaving behind fundamental things like "I don't know what it is, but it's delicious when I eat it."
Interestingly, most wives forget their husbands first lol

However, we staff members just get forgetful due to aging and are not ill, but everyone is tired from night shifts, so we do incomprehensible things after a night shift.
The other day, I made chicken ramen, cracked a raw egg, dunked the contents into the sink strainer, and put the shell into the egg pocket.
A staff member was using a vacuum cleaner and asked me,
"It won't move, I wonder why?" so when I checked the outlet, a shocking fact was revealed.

She was cleaning while using an extension cord that could plug in three things, attached to the vacuum cleaner's outlet.
The extension cord was short, and she was moving around the wide floor, frequently unplugging and replugging it so it wouldn't get caught on the residents' feet.
One was the vacuum cleaner's plug, but a familiar-looking plug was also inserted.

It was the plug for the extension cord itself!

Even Fleming would be surprised! This kind of thing happens every day.
The residents are also interesting. One elderly man who is bedridden and nearing the end of his life hardly speaks anymore, but when he eats a nutritional supplement pudding, he says,
"That's delicious!"
One day,
when I asked, "Mr. XX, is it delicious?"
he took a breath and shouted, "It's fresh!" lol
The next day, when I asked, "Is it fresh?"
he said, "...I suppose so," and for some reason, his mood plummeted. Why? lol

For example, when a resident with a low level of care needs makes excuses because they are embarrassed about forgetting something,
it's called (covering-up behavior) and it's generally not very cute. It's common for them to say they didn't get breakfast or that someone stole it.
Since I'm used to it, while listening,
I use closed questions like "So, would you like udon or ramen for lunch?" to get them to answer and make it seem like their wishes were heard.

Agitation is contagious, so it may look like we are deceiving them, but it is one of the techniques of caregiving.
Our caregiving might be wrong.
However, the reason we can treat the residents kindly is that
we think, "I might get dementia myself someday," and
we might feel that our own range of movement and actions have started to become the same.
In terms of dementia, this is called "stereotypical behavior."
It is difficult to engage in new things on one's own,
and one repeats the same actions day after day.

I'm a trembling 51-year-old who feels like I only go to Kohnan, Aeon, and Nirin-kan.