The end of the second week

The last few days seem to have passed really quickly. When you don't write your blog for a while, its hard to remember everything you've done. We celebrated the end of the stirke by going to the pub. It was a great laugh! The next day was a bit slow to start due to the late night. We didn't really do much yesterday. There was a patient on the 4th floor who had a birthday and a few of the volunteers know him quite well and so we threw him a surprise party and got him some cakes and a card and a present. We put balloons in his room while he was in the garden and all shouted surprise when he came back. He seemed really touched by the gesture, and it really did make his day, he was really grateful.
We had movie night yesterday too. It went well. But there was one woman we encountered when we were taking patients back who was really distressed. She's completely deaf and got really confused when people left to go watch the movie. She thought it might be morning and wondered why no one was coming to give her a bath, and thought she wasn't getting one because she was being punished. She doesn't understand Zulu as well as English and the nurses hadn't taken the time to explain things to her. She kept saying everyone was telling her not to be such a cry baby and even claimed that the nurses had hit her. I'm not saying thats true because I know that she was very confused, but either way she was really really distressed because she couldn't communicate with anyone. One of the volunteers had the idea of making her some flash cards that she can point to, or that we can point to in order to communicate with her. But last night we had to spend a lot of time with her explaining that she wasn't being punished and it was actually night time, not morning. Eventually we got her to go to sleep. It upset quite a few of the volunteers because she was so so distressed and there was so little we could do for her. 
Today was a good day. I finally got to help out with the physio department. I'd been trying to for a while, but never got the chance. So i helped to bring some patients down, but I didn't manage to convince many of them to come. Then we took some up to the gym after the group session and helped them on their personal training. After that we took the patients back to their rooms. There is a really cute guy on the 4th floor who's wheelchair bound and dumb, but he's really nice and laughs a lot. I'm not sure how aware he is of his condition or where he is, and seems to be a bit innocent, but he's a very pleasant man. We bumped into Edward and Ruth and I took him for a trip to the mall. We sat and had a drink at a coffee shop. I had an amazing milkshake...yummy! It was such a small thing, but I think it made Edwards day. Again he was telling us about how the war has screwed him up in the head, but I don't think there is much available for him therapeutically speaking. 
We also spent some time with a lady on the 4th floor who is really lonely. She is relatively young, but had no family or friends. Shes quite demanding and always asks for sweets or bubblegum but she's quite funny. We gave her some wool and knitting needles just to try and keep her mind of the pain in her legs. We spent some time with her later on too and she's started knitting a pink thing, not quite sure what its going to turn out to be. When we went to see her, it was just to check how the knitting was going, but she asked us not to go. So we chatted to her for a while and I rolled her wool into a ball for her, but when we eventually left to go get some dinner, she said she missed us already. I felt really bad for her, and I think some of the nurses and staff get annoyed at her because she's so bossy. But I quite like her, she's easy to deal with, she just tells you what she wants with no trying to mind read! She was telling me how she used to be really beautiful. She's still quite beautiful, but shes REALLY REALLY thin and the whites of her eyes are yellowing quite badly. She's not even on ARV's yet, not quite sure why. I felt useful today, even though it doesn't sound like we did much, but I felt like I spent some good quality time with some of the patients, which is the most important thing about being here. 
Anyway, off to the Drakensberg tomorrow. I feel slightly guilty about that, and when the patients ask if we can come see them over the weekends, I tend to lie and just say we're busy rather than that we're going off on a jolly. But I must admit, it was really nice last weekend to get a break. We do live here at the hospice so its hard to get a real break.
Have a good weekend everyone, and thanks very much for all the messages of support. Glad to know that people are really reading this!  

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