Not My Job!

I'll admit that there have been occasions when I have wished violence to some of my charges. There have been times when it was a real good thing (for everyone involved) that there was a closed heavy steel door between us.


But I am neither an executioner nor a hospice worker. I am also not a nurse, nor a doctor, nor a licensed gerontologist. Yet it feels like I am being forced into one or more of those roles and I don't like it one bit.

There's this inmate. Let's call him "Buck". Buck is an older guy, but not all that much older. Mid-sixties, maybe. Down for the long count for some serious armed robbery type stuff. I'm pretty sure i posted about him before. He's fading fast with senile dementia and Alzheimer's. He's not all there any more. Doesn't know where he is half the time and doesn't care the other half. We sent him up to the "Hospital" some months ago and they said "Yep! He's got dementia and alzheimer's! Good luck, here ya go!" and sent him back. It seems they're not "set up" to take care of that kind of patient/inmate. WTF????

Well, it seems there was also something wrong with him physically so they sent him up to a regular hospital and rumor has it that they diagnosed him with terminal lung cancer. And they aren't "set up" to take care of alzheimer's patients either, so THEY sent him back. Huhhh??

A decision was made and he was to be kept up in our medical ward at the prison and they said we wouldn't be getting him back.

Today we got him back.

It seems medical is tired of dealing with him, since he both won't listen and can't hear and he lays around naked all the time and it embarrasses the nurses. Let me rephrase that. It embarrasses the nursing supervisors. The nurses themselves (most of them, anyway) are professionals and don't get rattled by something small like a naked man. They know he's a loony as a duffel bag full of caterpillars and they just do their jobs.

They knew that our assigned house nurse (who is a great guy and knows what we go through and stands up for us) and our boss were both going to be gone so they made the decision to send Buck back down to the Adseg unit.

Where we will probably get to watch him die live on camera.

I'm not happy about this.

Medical claims that the pshrinks say he's sane enough to return to general population. The pshrinks are all saying it's medical calling the shots and they wanted him to stay in medical. Sarge and I raised a stink higher up but nobody will make a decision either way. And neither our nurse or the boss are around to back us up.

Dammit.

Snap.

This is just B.S. and it's pissing me off all over again just trying to put it down into words. But I think it will help a little now that I've let it out.

Thanks for listening.